If Jon Heder's geeky Napoleon is at all typical of the average male in an American high school, then God help the most powerful nation on Earth. America has already made the film into a cult movie - and Napoleon into the kind of unheroic hero we all love to cherish.
He is hopeless in every way, but no more so than his Mexican friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez), who wants to be voted class president for no discernible reason, or Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), who buys a time machine from the internet in order to go back to his youth, because he now thinks he'd have made a superb quarterback.
Almost everyone is a little crazy in a film that rivals Election for sheer kookiness.
Fortunately, director Jared Hess doesn't just patronise his characters. He actually likes them, so this eccentric epic, shot like an anti-Hollywood movie with long, slow takes, has a warmth that avoids simple satire.
I think it is trying to say that we are all a bit odd and shouldn't be lumped together as fodder for the powerful. But that might be stretching Napoleon Dynamite a mite too far.
Napoleon Dynamite
Cert: PG
