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"You know, there is like a buttload of gangs at this school. This one gang kept asking me to join because I'm pretty good with a bowstaff."

Napoleon Dynamite premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, where it was snapped up by Fox Searchlight. The distributor is now attempting to stage a guerilla buzz campaign of sorts, holding countless pre-release screenings in dozens of markets, encouraging repeat viewings, holding contests, giving out t-shirts and prizes, trying not to stimulate word of mouth so much as beat it out of people. The orchestrators of this elaborate marketing ambush are clearly looking to build a sleeper hit from the ground up, starting small and crawling outward, as more and more people find out about this little obscurity that everyone just loves. Perhaps no one is thinking on a My Big Fat Greek Wedding scale -- that's impossible -- but maybe The Full Monty?

I understand the strategy but cannot abide its presumed beneficiary. Oh, it may well work -- the preview audience at my screening was nothing if not enthusiastic -- but it will be an unjust victory. Napoleon Dynamite is ostentatious and pointless, firing quirkiness out of a machine gun and saying nothing in the process. We are supposed to laugh because look how weird these people are and how oddly they act. We do laugh sometimes, surprisingly -- I must admit that many of the jokes hit the mark and that the movie doesn't feel longer than it should. But while the film pretends to have heart, its chest cavity is dark, hollow and echoey.

The obvious influence here is Wes Anderson, who has a similar penchant for filling his movies with eccentric geeks and trying to make us like and/or feel for them. Napoleon Dynamite should be particularly irritating to Anderson fans (and they are legion), as it cheapens and literalizes his approach to characters, turning an occasionally affecting filmmaking style into a series of cheap jokes. For those of us (mostly pariahs in the movie buff world) who don't see Wes Anderson as the Second Coming of God Knows Who, it's even worse, with the man's most nagging tendencies amplified to the nth degree.

The title character (yes, "Napoleon Dynamite" is the name of a person, though why that is his name is anybody's guess), played by Jon Heder, is a weird resident of the weird town of Preston, Idaho. He is so strange that one is at a loss for words to describe him -- imagine the most awkward, anti-social person in your junior high school combined with the slowest and least likable (the kind who, for example, might make up a fictitious girlfriend). He doesn't speak, he asserts -- every sentence has an emphasis on the last syllable.

His family -- indeed, it seems everyone in Preston -- gives him a run for his money in sheer inscrutability. He is raised by his grandmother, whose primary concern is a llama named Tina. His brother Kip is a somewhat frightening manchild who maintains an evidently passionate online relationship with his cyber-girlfriend Lafawnduh. When grandma is injured in an off-roading accident, in comes Uncle Rico (John Gries), who videotapes himself throwing a football and dreams of high school sports days gone by. Eventually he starts up a venture selling tupperware out of his van.

I concede that there is an impressive amount of amusing bits in Napoleon Dynamite. "Rex Kwon Do" is funny. When Napoleon intones to his friend, "You left your stuff in my locker; you'd better take it because I can't fit my nunchucks in there anymore," that's funny. It's funny when Napoleon picks up a "D-Qwon's Dance Grooves" tape and starts learning the moves (though the payoff to this isn't nearly so amusing). Hell, even the idea of Kip preparing for the Ultimate Fighting Championships -- particularly the sight gag that inevitably goes along with this -- had me chuckling.

But for what? To what end? Usually, if a movie is funny enough, I won't ask these questions (and will even get angry at those who do so), but Napoleon Dynamite is trying so desperately to become a cult hit that I couldn't give it a pass. The weirdness is for naught: the characters aren't endearing, they aren't likable, they aren't anything. This is an empty shell of a film, the likely result of Wes Anderson being replaced by a robot impostor.