Richard Linklater's latest movie, which opens shortly, is a fictionalised version of Eric Schlosser's hit non-fiction book 'Fast Food Nation'.
With the tagline 'The Truth is Hard to Swallow', you'll know that's true once you've watched this journey to the dark heart of where your two all-beef patties come from.
Greg Kinnear plays Mickey's Fast Food Restaurants head of marketing, and inventor of the “The Big One”, and he is sent to check out not so tasty goings on at the meat packing plant where Mickey's (standing in for McDonald's here) burgers come from.
He drives out to beautiful Denver, Colorado, and it looks like you're floating over open prairie until the camera swoops in and reveals miles and miles of steel pens crammed with cows chowing down on genetically engineered food. No roaming longhorns here.
His story runs parallel to that of some young Mexicans crossing the border for the first time to work in the US. Some of these unlucky sould end up working for Uni-Globe Meatpacking for low wages and dangerous conditions.
Inside here is where you realise the true meaning of fast food. So many corners are cut in making the food (in killing and processing the animals) and ensuring that only cheapest meat makes it down the line as fast as possible. This leads to mishaps as cow intestines splitting and shit getting into the meat.
Bruce Willis does a good turn as the man responsible for the meatpacking contract for Mickey's in Denver. He plays a hardball Republican whose answer to healthy quibbles is a diatribe about all the things wrong with "this country today" speech. His response to a bit of shit on the food is to "cook it". He doesn't mention anything about eating it.
Linklater favourite and 'Before Sunrise' star Ethan Hawke is back, but this time he plays mentor to a new generation of slackers and is merely there to retell stories from his days of student activism, which leads to the final strand in the movie, where Hawkes’ niece in the movie leads one of the film’s funniest scenes as he and her student friends try to set the cows free... only to find that they can not get them to leave their grass-free steel enclosures because that is the only life they know.
It gets gory at times, but if you're going to eat the stuff, you should at least know where it comes it from.
If you haven't seen the trailer you can watch it here.
Gordon Macmillan
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