AniInterview Sorry, this movie sucks

Ketrivie It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Scotty Burke It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

Cemre T A lot of problems like migration, the real face of the fast food industry, the way they treat animals, work accidents, people using methamphetamine etc. were mentioned during movie. But these problems could have been shown more detailed. Thinking of the basis of the characters, it was really insufficient. It could be a better movie but it's still worth to see to gain a point of view about what really goes on till we have our fast food meal.

Gordon-11 This film tells the stories of people who work in the fast food industry, including top management, store manager, cashier, and illegal workers in meat processing plants. "Fast Food Nation" isn't as interesting or funny as I thought it might be. The vast number of well known actors aren't really put to good use, as they mostly have very small roles. The stories they tell are not very interesting, with the exception of the migrant workers whose tough lives and harsh working conditions should evoke sympathy. The cashier's story is rather plain. It doesn't expose the horrors of the industry either, except in the final few minutes where they show what happens in an abattoir. If shock tactic is to be used, why leave it until the last few minutes? And slaughtering animals is not unique to the fast food industry. Hence, the augments against the fast food industry is weak and hardly convincing. "Super Size Me" does a way better job at alarming people while being entertaining. This film does neither. I frankly felt bored most of the time while watching "Fast Food Nation".

SnoopyStyle Fast food chain Mickey's Burger has a hit in the Big One. Don Anderson (Greg Kinnear) is a marketing VP in development in their California headquarters. Independent research has found extremely high fecal count in their frozen patties and Don is sent to the Colorado meat-packer to investigate. Old-timer Rudy Martin (Kris Kristofferson) tells him about the hard truths. Harry Rydell (Bruce Willis) is their corrupt meat buyer. Amber (Ashley Johnson) and Brian (Paul Dano) work at the local Mickey's. Amber lives with her single mom Cindy (Patricia Arquette) and they're visited by activist uncle Pete (Ethan Hawke). Meanwhile illegals like Raul (Wilmer Valderrama), Coco (Ana Claudia Talancón), and Sylvia (Catalina Sandino Moreno) sneak into the US to become part of low wage workforce being exploited. Supervisor Mike (Bobby Cannavale) abuses his position by hooking up with Coco. Her sister Sylvia is not happy with the relationship and her drug use.Director Richard Linklater is adapting the scathing investigative book on the fast food industry by layering three stories on top of the material. It leaves the movie scattered, a bit flat, and too preachy to have much compelling shock factor. Linklater is caught trying to make drama while doing a documentary. I do find two of the three stories to be pretty interesting. I don't like Kinnear's character's awkward naivety. He's in the meat business but has to act dumb. Willis may as well twirl his evil mustache. There is a tale of corporate political corruption but it fails to dramatize it. Ashley Johnson is an interesting lead but her side of the story pales in comparison to the illegals working in the plant. I think that is where the movie shines and it also has the horrifying slaughter room walk-through. The movie would have been more compelling concentrating on that story.

Robert J. Maxwell Judging from the title, I'd expected this to be something along the lines of a fable like "Supersize Me" or some documentary on The Learning Channel teaching us a lesson on hot dogs and french fries. But no. It's am ambitious drama about the illegal importation of Mexicans to work in a meat-processing plant to service a chain of burger joints called "Mickeys." There are multiple narratives. They cover the story of a marketing agent for Mickeys (Gregg Kinnear) who finds out more about how Mickey's burger patties are produced than he cares to know. Then there are the illegal Mexicans who include the magnetic Colombian actress Catalina Sandino Moreno from "Maria Full of Grace." Actually I got some of the Mexicans mixed up. Not Moreno or Luis Guzman, because they're familiar faces, but some of the other characters blend into one another, especially in the meat-packing plant where all of them wear the same uniforms and surgical masks. We get to know a little about some high school kids who are offended by the conditions the cattle live under, and by the fact that there excreta are dumped into ponds and eventually reach the river. There are relatively short scenes involving Kris Kristofferson and Bruce Willis.The movie is a polemic that demonstrates how money and the need to make as much of it as possible corrupts. "Everything's being taken over by machines," intones Kristofferson, an old curmudgeon who loves "the land." That's pretty much the point of the whole movie, as long as we can define "machine" broadly to include mechanisms made up of socially agreed-upon rules.I was generally sympathetic to the film's agenda but it might have been better if the script had stuck with one person and one narrative thread -- maybe Kinnear's. The script is guilty of pandering though. Mickey's Burgers corrupts, and absolute Mickey's Burgers corrupt absolutely. There's something hateful about everyone associated with Mickey's. The foreman bones all the good-looking young women. Even the guy working at the local outlet spits a ginder into one of the burgers before passing it on to the customer. (Cf., "Casino" in which the same thing was done.) And what, asks the film, can be done about it all? Nothing. The dice of the gods are loaded. The governor of Colorado received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Uniglobal Meat Packing, and the chief of the state's EPA is married to one of its executives. The high schoolers get a lecture from an experienced activist and they cut the wires surrounding the cattle pen. Alas, the cattle are too stupid to know they have been freed and they refuse to leave. That's one advantage cattle have over us. They don't suffer from ontological Angst. They don't ask themselves questions like, "What the hell am I doing, standing here up to my shakra points in my own manure?" They probably don't have any fear about their fates because they don't have the concept of "death". It comes as a surprise when one of them is beaned with an air gun, drained of blood, gutted, sawed up, slashed to pieces, and fed to happy families. The writers and director have the good taste to save this scene for the climax of the movie. I mean that sarcastically.Eating meat represents a low level of ecological efficiency. Instead of eating 100 calories worth of grass, we feed the grass to cattle, butcher them, and get 10 calories out of it. The rest of it goes to waste, in both senses of the word. Yet the movie is offensively preachy. Why must an important message be spelled out as if to a class of first graders, encased in lectures? Seeing the chunks of meat and fat being processed is enough to turn anyone into a strict vegetarian. The problem is that Homo sapiens is, and has always been, an omnivore. And the problem behind THAT problem is that there are too many Homo sapiens and their number is increasing exponentially. The more of us there are, the more pressure we must by necessity put on the natural and the economic environments. If things continue as they are, there won't be any Kris Kristofferson's boasting about protecting his land from machines. We'll all be chewed up and spit out like hamburger patties because people have to eat, don't they? The only nation on earth that seems to have this figured out is China. It doesn't take a computer to nail down the figures. An abacus will do.Something just occurred to me. Suppose you're a vegetarian restricted to a kosher diet? And in addition you were committed to organically grown food and averse to genetically engineered food, artificial additives, preservatives, and you avoided fats because they cause cancer, and salt because of concerns about blood pressure, and proteins because of the possibility of gout, and carbohydrates because they might lead to diabetes? That might ease the problem of overpopulation.