Fast Food Nation
Don't eat before you see "Fast Food Nation." In fact, you should probably avoid eating for 24 hours after seeing the film.This ensemble drama (with some satiric elements) features graphic scenes of animal slaughter and butchering that will certainly churn stomachs. It wouldn't be surprising if some audience members become vegetarians.
As for the film's cinematic merits, "Fast Food Nation" is a also bit of a queasy mess.
This fictionalized, feature-film version of former journalist Eric Schlosser's expose of fast-food production conditions, mass marketing, and immigration and social concerns, is crammed too full of ideas. As a result, little of it has the power it should ... save perhaps those slaughterhouse sequences.
Most of the story lines spin out of a marketing man's trip to Colorado. The rather naive fast-food exec Don Anderson (Greg Kinnear) has been sent by his boss to check out some possible health violations at a plant that supplies the chain's meat.
He has no idea what he's in for there, and neither does illegal immigrant Sylvia (Catalina Sandino Moreno), who has come to the United States with her boyfriend Raul (Wilmer Valderrama) to find work. They wind up working at the same slaughter house Don is investigating, the same plant that idealistic teen Amber (Ashley Johnson) and her friends are planning to sabotage.
Still, the performances are very good, especially by Kinnear and up-and-coming actress Moreno ("Maria Full of Grace").
"Fast Food Nation" is rated R for strong sexual language (profanity, slang and other suggestive talk), graphic animal gore and scenes of butchery, simulated sex and other sexual contact, drug content (meth use and references), brief female nudity, and use of racial epithets. Running time: 114 minutes.
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