Before seeing Fast Food Nation I was expecting a satire that would do to fast food what Thank You for Smoking did to the tobacco industry.
   If only.
   Richard Linklater's latest is a humorless, glum multi-character melodrama that plays like John Sayles Lite.
   Ultimately it gets in a few good punches at the expense of corporate food and it might even put some viewers off meat -- providing they can stick with this joyless two hours.
   Fast Food Nation is based on the nonfiction best-seller of the same name by Eric Schlosser. The book was filled with facts and stomach-churning anecdotes about what happens to some of our food on the way to our tables, but it didn't have a plot.
   The movie doesn't either. Schlosser and Linklater had to create fictional characters, and that's just what they feel like: Fiction.
   The first half of the film centers on Don Anderson (Greg Kinnear), the marketing genius behind the Big One, the signature burger sold at Mickey's franchises all over the world. The Big One is a huge success, thanks mostly to a laboratory that has captured the taste of sizzling beef in a test tube.
   But independent laboratory analysis has found fecal matter in the burgers, and Don is dispatched to Colorado to file a report on the processing plant where all the Big Ones come from.
   Running parallel to Don's investigation is another plot about illegal aliens. Sylvia (Catalina Sandino Moreno), husband Raul (Wilmer Valderrama) and her sister Coco (Ana Claudia Talancon ) risk their lives to cross into the United States and end up working at that same meat packing plant. There the party girl Coco soon finds herself providing sexual favors for a predatory foreman (Bobby Cannavale).
   Yet another plot involves Amber (Ashley Johnson), a high school girl who works at a Mickey's outlet and gradually becomes an anti-meat activist.
   The film is packed with familiar faces playing characters that are nothing more than mouthpieces for various viewpoints : Bruce Willis is a boorish meat buyer for Mickey's, Kris Kristofferson is a rancher of the old school, Ethan Hawke is Amber's bohemian uncle, Esai Morales is a Mickey's franchise operator, Avril Lavigne is a would-be eco terrorist.
   The filmmakers are eager to blame the fastfood industry for everything from America's health to the immigration situation (although for that logic to hold we'd have to give up eating lettuce along with red meat), but the plot's jerry-rigged construction keeps us from taking any of it seriously.
   In the end Fast Food Nation feels like a class project that got out of hand.
   

Fast Food Nation
   DCast :
Catalina Sandino Moreno, Wilmer Valderrama, Ana Claudia Talancon, Greg Kinnear, Bobby Cannavale

Director:
Richard Linklater

Rating:
R for disturbing images, strong sexuality, language and drug content

Running time:
106 minutes Some dialogue in Spanish with English subtitles

This story was published Friday, November 17, 2006