Like a series of skits strung together into a feature film, Napoleon Dynamite is fitfully funny but ultimately hollow. Director and co-writer Jared Hess crafts a memorable figure in the title character (Jon Heder), a sort of nerd version of Beavis and/or Butt-head, who spends his time in rural Preston, Idaho, playing tetherball, feeding his grandmother's llama and hanging out with laconic best friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez).
Without anything resembling a plot, Hess simply surrounds the awkward, dim Napoleon with a cast of equally bizarre characters, and presents bits in what most closely resembles a three-panel comic strip: Napoleon's fey brother (Aaron Ruell) finds love on the Internet; Pedro runs for class president; Napoleon's oily uncle Rico (Jon Gries) tries to use a time machine to head back to 1982 and relive his high-school-football glory days.
The bits are hit-and-miss, though the funny ones are often very funny. Hess' characters, as distinctive as they can be, rarely go beyond caricature. His attention to detail has brought him comparisons to Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums), and while he shares Anderson's emphasis of the clever over the insightful, ultimately Hess' film is just about the gags, and those are mostly enough.