Being a nerd is never easy, especially if you’re Napoleon Dynamite. Jon Heder plays the hero in this little film in which from day in and day out he is picked on by bullies, eats tatter tots during tests, rejected by the beautiful chicks and lives with a strange family including a cousin who not only is thirty-two years old, but chats on the internet everyday trying to meet the perfect somebody. With the departure of Napoleon’s grandma who is away on vacation and has an accident, his Uncle Rico is there to stay and makes his life worse and pathetic for his cousin who tries to get him into schemes. Our main hero tries to help a Mexican kid name Pedro, in which like Napoleon, his life sucks as well. He comes from Juarez, Mexico in which he tries to ask the beautiful girl name Summer (Haylie Duff) to the school dance, but is rejected; even the principal discriminates Pedro’s customs.
There have been many films featuring loser characters in which not only do we identify with them, but we felt for them also. Take for instance ’’Welcome to the Dollhouse’’ in which Dawn Weiner was the middle child who didn’t get the attention she deserved (it’s common), plus she was in middle school, the worst days for kids, not to mention her last name was Weiner for which kids made references to hot dogs and placed dog pictures in her locker; Harvey Pekar from ’’American Splendor’’ is more of a guy’s loser in which he placed every detail in life into his comic books, not to mention how much he felt as a worthless human being since society prefer people with an education background or good looks; now people have Napoleon Dynamite, another loser we can relate too.
The end of the movie made me cheer as I realize that Napoleon does have his days where he helps Pedro defeat the candidate for student body president, not to mention that his cousin gets the girl he wants and his mean Uncle gets the crap kicked out of him. One thing that I particularly liked about this movie was that they’ve successfully managed to create America of the eighties even though the movie was made in 2004. really makes u feel kinda nostalgic.