Film: Fast Food Nation
Genre: Drama
Release Date: November 17rd, 2006
Distributor: Fox Searchlight
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 2 hrs. 36 min.
Review by Sirus

Starring:
Greg Kinnear
Bruce Willis

Based on a book with the same title, Fast Food Nation is a movie about the things going on in the burger industry. The entire movie is about the crap that’s in the meat at a place called Mickys (would be McDonalds but we all know they wouldn’t want that). The movie is shown through more of a story than most documentaries with quite a few familiar faces including Avril Lavine. The movie takes place through two stories at first and then adds a third one later. We have two contrasting stories of the executive at Mickys who is sent to a meat packing plant to investigate the shit that is allegedly in the meat and the Mexicans crossing the border to work at that plant.

The Mexicans are portrayed as pitiable people who don’t deserve the bad conditions they live in. Later on, we are shown one of the workers at the Mickys near the plant who gets caught up with an environmental activist group attempting to do something about the poor cows living in the cramped pens. It’s all kind of thrown together with a little gross out factor and two sex scenes to make it less boring. There are a lot of scenes of the cows going through the factory being cut up to process into patties but it’s really only meant for shock value to make the audience gross out if they have never seen what meat factories are like.

Fast Food Nation feels more like a bunch of preachy liberals sitting together talking about the problems and few really doing anything except for the environmentalists who try to free the cows. People who are looking for an informative look at what is really going on in the industry should read the book and ignore the movie. They are so out of things to point out that they decide to attack the Patriot Act. This movie is certainly not worth seeing no matter how much buzz they put on it for its wide release. You would have a much better time watching Super Size Me on DVD.

Final Score: 1.5/5