"Fast Food Nation" (2006) - Movie Review

The ill effects of fast food are well known to any reasonable customer out of millions in the US market and yet we all visit again and again and again. It is a mass producing machine of common food to those millions. And when it involves cows mainly as the source material, no one wants to know the killing part of it, which by the way is in enormous amount. The meat packing machine is no pleasant trip to a chocolate factory or the beer lover’s paradise in brewery. While one need not exactly know the graphic detail of what is going on, any one can draw a picture of the process happening inside, nauseatingly disgusting and inhumane. And director Richard Linklater is never able to find the focus on the root cause or the other internal details he promise to open up in the start which leaves the end unfinished.

The film is about this fictional fast food franchise company Mickey’s with their popular and successful brand “The Big One”. The meat comes from a small town Cody, Denver. There are three stories which are supposedly tried to be connected by this Meat Packing Company Uniglobe (USP as they call it). There are Mexican immigrants Raul (Wilmer Valderrama), his wife Sylvia (Catalina Sandino Moreno) and her sister Coco (Ana Claudia Talancón) getting tangled by the supervisor of the plant Mike (Bobby Cannavale). Then the investigative story of Don (Greg Kinear), Vice President of Mickey’s who sees the real meat inside the patties they get, something which will bug in every burger eating people. Finally is the high school girl Amber (Ashley Johnson) who is working in one of the Mickey fast foods and working hard to make ends meet. There is no connectivity whatsoever in between these three stories. Finally nothing achieves anything out of it either.

There is a blatant blunder visible in this film, which is to give the polishing layer of independent movie with events turning sour in a stream line random play of scenes only with no conviction. There are scenes of no significance or to be precise no purpose. When we meet the mean Mike, we know the worst will happen for Raul and Sylvia especially when the meat packing machinery is unsafe and how Mike sleeps around with the confused and weak women under his supervision which includes Coco. Similarly the corporate ball game is known and when Don gets into the saddle of hunting the truth, it is predictable too. Nothing concentrates on the real ground breaking effects of this fast food other than that it is highly unhealthy with disgusting ingredients and the menial labour work put upon the people who are in desperate needs looking for desperate remedies.

When Amber’s uncle Pete (Ethan Hawke) comes for the ten minutes is when some enlightenment is visible. I would have been more interested to see the aspiring yet confused girl Amber getting the correct guidance from Pete. Even if the essentiality is over the deadly fast food, Linklater wobbles does not either concentrate on the direct linked problem or the drama which surrounds it with more audacity in his usual ways. There is a serious back step in every story which brings out the brutality of life but has been delicately, poetically and touchingly done in various other movies.

Characters which are put upon for no reason and it keep on coming up till the movie ends. One of the Mexican while trying to cross the border getting lost and eventually dies, Coco as such who serves no purpose than to see the manipulating nature of Mike but she likes it too and finally the friend of Raul who gets into an accident along with Raul are unnecessary and left as such without any aid to the screenplay. Don while unveiling the nature of the industry does not have substantiate reason to think on going about publicizing and solving the problem even though he talks about losing his job for which there is no real evidence over the screen for his shift in conscience.

It well would put gross thoughts into any meat eating member as would any video showing the killings of the cows and their extraction of meat. You do not need a film feature to propagate that message. The story appears to go nowhere but it is simply people making choices to make their living in their day to day life. I sure do sympathize for them but routing it back to a fast food phenomenon does not abide the concept the film preaches upon.