Features > Movie Reviews > Fast Food Nation…

But the cows won't budge. 'What's the matter with them, don't they want to be free?' groans exasperated Alice (pop princess Avril Lavigne). 'Maybe they're too comfortable here,' suggests Paco (Lou Taylor Pucci). Whatever. Their beef is cooked.

It's a big, bold dramatic scene of the kind Linklater rarely indulges in - his films are generally gab-fests like Before Sunset and Waking Life. And of course it's not really about the animals. It's about you and me, our propensity to follow the herd even on the path to self-destruction.

Eric Schlosser book is one of the more important works of non-fiction in recent times, a stringent and scary account of how the American fast food industry gobbled up mom-and-pop restaurants and started pouring trans-fats and E.coli down the hungry gullets of our kids.

A documentary would have been the obvious way to go, but perhaps mindful of how Super Size Me had already gone that route, maverick British producer Jeremy Thomas suggested Linklater and Schlosser collaborate on 'a real movie'.

The merits of this strategy are debatable, but the book is there in paperback for anyone who wants to consult it, and the movie may appeal to a wider audience piqued by the presence of Lavigne, Ethan Hawke, Bruce Willis et al.

Despite the cattle rustling, the movie is not what you would call plot-driven. Instead it keeps tabs on several characters over a couple of months.

The most engaging and fully-realised is probably Kinnear marketing executive, a top guy at Mickey's burgers, sent to the company's Colorado meat-packing plant to find out how shit could get into the pattie. At first he's impressed by the factory tour, but as his investigation digs deeper he begins to lose his appetite for the product.

Then there's Amber (Ashley Johnson), a cashier at a Mickey's franchise who begins to realise the corporate ladder may be a slippery slope.

Meanwhile Sylvia and Coco (Catalina Sandino Moreno and Ana Claudia Talancon) are Mexican sisters who cross into the US for work and find it at the packing plant. The conditions may stink but the money is 20 times what they could earn back home.

By taking this relatively broad social cross-section Linklater ensures that this isn't just a single-issue film, it's about something much bigger: unrestrained capitalism.

'This isn't about good people vs bad people,' rancher Kris Kristofferson announces, cutting to the heart of the matter, 'It's about the machine that's taken over this country. It's like something out of science fiction. The land, the cattle, human beings This machine doesn't give a shit.'

It's a great speech - and a sentiment worth airing. But it's also characteristic of this movie's half-digested attempts to illustrate polemical points. (Bruce Willis is wheeled on next to present the conservative line, and almost steals the film out from under.)

The big picture is incisive and - I think - true: political checks have buckled under the influence of the profit motive, and we're all caught up on the conveyor belt. But the human dramas here are mostly banal and, contrary to the rancher's line, the movie does engage in simplistic moral oppositions, most notably in the character of the venal and exploitive factory floor manager played by Bobby Cannavale ('Bad? He's the worst,' someone says.)

In the end I would recommend Fast Food Nation as an admirable and ambitious attempt to wrestle with questions crucial to how we proceed as a society over the next half-century. But I wish the movie had a bit more blood pumping through its veins. Heck, it might even have been improved with a Rotoscope overlay, a la Scanner Darkly.