By Sean Moeller

Sometimes grown men wear stretchy pants and sometimes when a friar shares some hard toast in private quarters with a foxy nun it leads to two people breaking their godly vows and getting married. Sometimes watching a man in white dress shoes and those stretchy pants climb a jagged cliff to guzzle the yolk of an egg to summon magical eagle powers that will allow him to perform figure-fore leg locks better than any other man in stretchy pants, it is funny. Sometimes Jack Black is too much. Sometimes he’s just enough.

As Nacho, in the second offering from “Napoleon Dynamite” creators Jared and Jerusha Hess, Black walked into the film as all of his previous characters combined. In doing this, we saw the lead singer of Sonic Death Monkey, Hal, the guitar player from Tenacious D, the Neil Diamond impersonator and Dewey Finn and Black failed to give Nacho – the one-track-minded man of the cloth who moonlights as a luchadore to (eventually) raise money for the orphans he works and lives with – the kind of unique personality that would have carried this movie beyond the cheap fart jokes, the questionable nods to scenes from Chris Farley’s last, “Almost Heroes,” and “Dumb and Dumber” and the so-so writing that was lacking the same pop that the Hesses gave to “Dynamite.”

If there’s one thing that is made intrinsically clear with “Nacho Libre” and which should have been made intrinsically clear with “Napoleon Dynomite,” it’s that large masses of people are willing to suspend their refined and grown-up tastes for the delicacies of idiocy. It’s not really the storyline that does anything for us. The point is to get so far off the wall that it all naturally feels off-the-cuff, as if there’s no way people spent years perfecting this dialogue. When Napoleon handles those chickens, gets paid in change, drinks yolky lemonade (more yolk gags!) and the old man with the speech impediment looks to yonder distance and talks about Shoshone arrowheads, it’s certainly not an integral part of the plot, but it’s exactly what “Nacho Libre” needed—the effortless quirkiness, not the quirkiness born of strain.

Jack Black, for all his overt cool, should—by now—be able to reign himself in. He should know that he doesn’t have to do that stupid, reeky-deeky-doo ventrili-solo or whatever the hell he calls it, in every single movie he makes. It was a glaringly ugly addition to a scene right before his big match with Ramses—the sour-appled god of all luchadores. He should know by now that toning it down ever so slightly could actually be a good thing. His best scenes in “Nacho Libre” are the ones where he doesn’t over-cook the moment and is trying to give Nacho a heartbeat and make him into a character that affects us the way Dynomite did and still does. The difficulty for Black and this role was that he could never cut the ties to his past roles. He instead chose to dig them back up and did some unwanted defibrillation. When he revs up his motorcycly golf cart-ish contraption, the face he makes is nothing Nacho would rightfully make, but one that the Jack Black biker from “Anchorman” would make punting Ron Burgandy’s Baxter into the river.

There are enough movies with a heartwarming message of proving people wrong and giving orphans the choice of a crisp salad over a saucer of refried beans. There are so many movies that have already been made with these evergreen plotlines that, with a nip and a tuck, get turned into the next “Ernest Goes To Camp” or “Tommy Boy” or whatever, but what I thought we had with the Hesses was a pair of writers who were going to consistently offer us a new batch of timeless characters that no matter what they do in any scene, they’re going to stand out as a bright color. They’ll get more chances and we’ll continue watching, but they must know their strengths, as Black must know his. I’ll still laugh every time I think of him asking Chancho if he can borrow some sweats. There just needs to be more of it.

Adverse to giving ratings, it’s hard to help giving this a leetle hug, leetle kees.