A lot of people hate Michael Moore, and it's easy to see why: he's obnoxious, grandiose, occasionally belittling and relentlessly obtuse in defending his viewpoints. However, it's these traits that make him a phenomenal showman, or at the very least, a political extremist worth listening to. Billy Wilder once said, ""If you're going to tell the truth, be funny or they will kill you""—wise words to remember when making an overtly political film. Maybe you're not required to be funny, per se, but if you want to convince groups of people to listen to you and/or your actors bitch for two hours, your bitching better be entertaining. Even the legendarily stiff Al Gore pulled this off, enticing droves of people to leave their homes in order to see him lecture about global warming because he and his collaborators didn't forget how to be engaging.
On the other side of the spectrum is Richard Linklater's ""Fast Food Nation,"" a stillborn, fictionalized adaptation of Eric Schlosser's acclaimed 2001 exposAc, which doesn't have much to say and seems all too aware of it. It is boring, didactic, pointless agenda-seeking bullshit—a condescending, lazy fiasco that seems to think we come to movies to hear a who's who of Hollywood liberals preach at us. Calling it one of the year's worst films doesn't even begin to do this drivel justice.
It's all the more frustrating because Schlosser's book has been hailed as an essential piece of journalism, taking dead aim at our consumerist culture and coming away with a less-than-flattering picture of contemporary America. It sounds like this century's version of ""The Jungle,"" with Schlosser's writing being celebrated as a return to the kind of turn-of-the-century muckraking popularized by the likes of Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens and so on and so forth. Although it's become somewhat of a clichAc to knock the fast food industry, especially after Morgan Spurlock's hilarious ""Super Size Me,"" corporate ubiquity and the depersonalization that comes with it are issues of inarguable weight and relevance. These issues deserve to be addressed in a creative, intriguing way to stimulate conversation and action.
Instead, Linklater and company decided to shoehorn everything into a moronic, one-dimensional storyline that follows a disparate ensemble of people involved, in some capacity, with the fast food industry. We've got a friendly ad executive (Greg Kinnear) who investigates allegations of fecal matter in the meat, an overworked high school student who gathers up the courage to quit (Ashley Johnson), an illegal immigrant couple (Catalina Moreno and Wilmer Valderrama) working on the meat-packing line, and many more. These barely connected stories are barely compelling anyway, but when combined with Linklater's relaxed, deliberately paced style, they become maddening and nearly unwatchable.
There are no characters in ""Fast Food Nation""—only whiny mouthpieces bemoaning the state of our McNation. One minute Kris Kristofferson is lamenting land development, the next its Ethan Hawke speechifying about individuality and making a difference. We keep waiting for Linklater to justify fictionalizing Schlosser's book, but instead of doing so, he gives us derisively simple, symbolic events like Avril Lavigne and pals trying to free a bunch of cows (but they don't know to escape, 'cause like, we consumers are the cows and we don't do anything about it, get it?) and Bobby Cannavale's sadistic meat-line supervisor screwing his female employees ('cause like, the meat industry screws its employees over, get it?). And do you know what the big payoff is? Moreno comes to work one day and is assigned to de-kidney the cow meat, which gives Linklater the opportunity to show us, up close and personal, a handful of cattle getting slaughtered and portioned up. She greets the task by quietly weeping, which we're prompted to do also—that is, those of us who are unaware that cows actually have to die before they can be converted into Big Macs, Whoppers, and ButterBurgers.
There is no earthly reason to see this movie. Conservatives and moderates will laugh at its toothless arrogance, liberals will be baffled and bored to tears by its sluggish ""plot,"" Schlosser fans will find few of his provocative warnings presented effectively, and cineastes will wonder if Linklater has lost his damn mind. Do vegans, clearly the choir Linklater is preaching to, really want to see cows getting graphically sliced and diced? If you weren't sure that cows die so we can eat shitty food and fuel corporate America, then by all means, this is your movie. For the rest of you out there, avoid this thing like the plague, because if you're like this reviewer, you'll walk out of this film disdainfully craving a Quarter Pounder.
