Eagle vs. Shark, 3.5 stars

How the shadow of Napoleon Dynamite grows shorter as time passes. I perused other reviews of this quirky, affecting comedy and found endless comparisons between the two films, which came out within a year or so of each other. However, with a few years intervening, I can truly say that unless I had been primed by those other reviews, "Napoleon Dynamite" would not even have entered my head for comparison.

Our setting is New Zealand. Lily is a cashier in a fast-food outlet at a mall. She is pretty in the way that such service workers often are, a unique attractiveness that ensures that more looks-based professions will never open to her. Compounding this is her shyness and her less-than-hip hobbies, mostly revolving around 32-bit video games and resoundingly average guitar-playing. Jarrod is a clerk at a nearby video game store. Lily loves him from afar in that idealized way that arises from only seeing someone under mall lighting. He likes the same video games she does and fancies himself a formidable physical threat to anything he sets his sights on. One night at a costume party they bond over a fighting game and have unintentionally touching sex. This cements their bond, at least as far as Lily is concerned, and a relationship blooms enroute to Jarrod's hometown, where he aspires to have a showdown with a bully who tormented him in high school.

This is a more realistic, darker film than "Napoleon Dynamite". Perhaps its milieu of unhip fringe dwellers who are legends in their own minds prompted the comparisons, but "Eagle vs. Shark" puts a bit more distance between us and the characters, allowing us to see the gaps between their self-image and the labels the world has placed on them. This added believability is crucial to scenes like the one where Lily discovers that Jarrod has a young child who lives with his parents in his tiny hometown. Such a down-to-earth revelation would be out of place in most quirky-loser movies, but this one deals with it sensitively and with a perfect touch. Jarrod's reaction both masks his obvious emotion and gives us a hint of where his desire to be seen as a hero may come from. This is a small film with small ambitions, but it ably exceeds them. Overall it is touching despite a few false notes, and while not as laugh-a-minute funny as others in its genre, it rings truer.