Film Night: Napoleon Dynamite Is Overrated

A few years ago I heard about the film Napoleon Dynamite but I had never got round to watching it. I recently discovered it was on Amazon Prime, so I decided it would be the perfect chance to watch it, so I did. WOW, it’s such a terrible film!

Have you seen those “Vote for Pedro” T-shirts? I saw them years ago, but never knew where they came from or what they were about. Well it’s to do with this film, and it has a cult following so those T-shirts are popular with the fans of this film. What’s it about and why is it so bad?

It’s about a 16 year old kid from a small town who doesn’t fit in at school, called Napoleon Dynamite. He lives with his brother Kip, who’s unemployed and 32 years old, and his grandmother, who breaks her coccyx and asks their uncle Rico to look after them, who is a middle age ex amateur American footballer who didn’t make it to the NFL. He teams up with Kip selling random things like a get rich quick scheme, Kip wants money to see a girl he’s met in chatrooms. Meanwhile Napoleon makes friends with a new kid at school, Pedro, who then decides to run for class president, which is where the “Vote for Pedro” thing came about.

The film is just bad. The characters are terrible, there’s nothing funny in the film at all, the story line, or lack of it, is terrible. Napoleon plays the annoying 16 year old American with the most annoying voice ever, like a miserable teen, so in that respect it could be authentic, but it makes for horrible viewing. Pedro is even worse, with less things to say than Napoleon. The dialogues are really poor, I guess they’re supposed to be, but it’s just a car crash to watch. The story is really poor, it just doesn’t seem to have any point to it at all, it doesn’t really have anywhere to go for a long time. You can’t really like any of the characters, they don’t really offer anything, there’s no emotion to any of them, with the exception of the character Deb. She is like the female version of Napoleon who’s shy, seems to run random businesses and becomes friends with Napoleon and Pedro.

The best part of the film is one the scenes at the end, Pedro gives his speech at the class President election and has to perform a skit, he didn’t realise he did, Napoleon then steps in to save his friend by dancing to Canned Heat by Jamiroquai.

So if you can’t tell, I didn’t enjoy the film! 😀 I am glad I watched it to see what it was all about, I was feeling a bit of FOMO, but I found out that I wasn’t missing anything. As you know I love a good coming of age film, I love a good comedy, and this is neither. It’s not that “I don’t get it”, I do, it’s that it’s just bad characters with no emotion and crappy dialogue; There’s no point in saying “Napoleon is like the usual 16 year old with miserable one word conversations, that’s authentic, so it’s automatically great”. It’s boring and tedious, coupled with a bad overall story which makes it a bad film.