Reviewed by Neil Davey
Stars Greg Kinnear, Catalina Sandino Moreno,
Ashley Johnson, Patricia Arquette, Luis Guzman,
Ethan Hawke, Kris Kristofferson, Bruce Willis
Written by Eric Schlosser and Richard Linklater,
based on the book by Schlosser
Certification US R | UK 15 | Australia M
Runtime 116 minutes
Directed by Richard Linklater
Based on Eric Schlosser’s best-selling exposé of the fast food industry, Fast Food Nation is a fictional interpretation of the dodgy practices behind that multi-billion-dollar business. Director Richard Linklater takes the facts of the book and squeezes them into a work of fiction and then squeezes lists of facts and figures into long speeches for his cast, devices that are not always terribly successful.
Don Henderson (Greg Kinnear), is a marketing executive at a nationwide burger chain called Micky’s, though quite who that might be a reference to is beyond us. Don discovers that Mickey’s have been selling meat contaminated with cow faeces and so he heads south to Cody, the site of their meat packers, to find out how it could have happened. During his travels, he hears all sorts of tales. In the meantime, for the audience’s benefit, other sides of the story — disgruntled burger flippers, Mexican workers — are shown to flesh out the story. No pun intended.
While Kinner makes an effective ‘everyman’ lead, the speeches he gets from his contacts, employees and associates sound like pages of Schlosser’s research read verbatim which, indeed, is probably what they are. Linklater is also clearly more at home with the eccentricities of certain characters than he is the facts and figures. There are some highlights here such as Kinnear, Bruce Willis (rapidly becoming Hollywood’s most engaging cameo actor) as Harry, the meat buyer who indicates that what the hell, we all need to eat a little shit sometimes, and the Mexican strand of the story — featuring Catalina Sandino Moreno, from Maria, Full of Grace — is moving and highly charged. However, the end result is less than the sum of its parts.
While it’s never less than entertaining, the power of the book is completely diluted and facts are reduced to epithets such as ‘chain restaurants use rubbish meat’. Even the attempted shock value of the final slaughterhouse footage is too little, too late. The effect of that is so diminished, the only real revelations it contains are ‘meat packing plants are horrible places to work’ and ‘beef comes from dead cows.’ There’s some salient information here but, on balance, the book is both more informative and enjoyable.