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100Fast Food Nation has the dramatic flatness and willful lack of personality of some documentaries -- or at least how Linklater thinks a documentary should be. The movie nonetheless feels like both a work of investigative journalism and an immense human-interest story, veering into muckraking, horror, teen comedy, and what passes for "Twilight Zone" science fiction.
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91Viewers expecting a blistering attack on the fast-food business, or an Altmanesque panorama, will be disappointed, but it's a sensitive and humane piece of work.
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90Like two of the year's other standout American films, Kelly Reichardt's "Old Joy" and Ryan Fleck's "Half Nelson," it's a movie of ideas in which the ideas flow effortlessly out of the material instead of being plastered on top with a heavy cement roller (as in "Crash," "Babel" and "Little Children").
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83Naturally, a subject this right-on draws a right-on cast. Kris Kristofferson, Avril Lavigne, and Ethan Hawke pitch in.
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83Fast Food Nation offers no easy answers, but plenty of food for thought.
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80Through it all, Fast Food Nation never really preaches to viewers, it just lays ideas out there. In that respect, it's every bit a talky, philosophical Richard Linklater movie.
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80If Linklater regards the fake culture that has replaced real places with horror, he has nothing but respect and affection for his characters, and the movie is rescued from nihilism by his humanistic view.
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80It's a mirror and a portrait, and a movie as necessary and nourishing as your next meal.
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80Many reviews have suggested that this is as politically mild as a John Sayles movie, but Linklater clearly agrees with the frustrated kid who says, "Right now, I can't think of anything more patriotic than violating the Patriot Act."
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75It's less an expose of junk-food culture than a human drama, sprinkled with sly, provoking wit, about how that culture defines how we live.
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75Linklater's working-class mosaic is seriously interested in how most of this country gets by for a living. And that, sadly, makes it distinctive.
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75Fast Food Nation picks up, and drops off, various members of its cast, sometimes without a satisfying resolution. But its final scenes, inside a real working meatpacking plant, on the killing floor, are brutally to the point.
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75What sets Fast Food Nation apart from other recent multi-character studies like "Crash," "Bobby," and "Babel" is that Linklater doesn't set up a single incident that ties all the story strands together.
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75The result is a hodgepodge: not as unpleasant as the alleged foodstuffs described in Schlosser's book, but not exactly prime rib.
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70A more materialist (and successful) ensemble film than the mystical "Babel," in that everyone is connected through the same economic system, Fast Food Nation is exotic for being a movie about work.
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70Richard Linklater's rough-hewn tapestry of assorted lives that feed off of and into the American meat industry is both rangy and mangy; it remains appealing for its subversive motives and revelations even as one wishes its knife would have been sharper.
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67It's a bold proposition, and the resulting film has some powerful moments and strong performances, but it fails to be an involving or satisfying drama, and it's not half as effective as the book in creating outrage over what junk food is doing to us.
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67Less a movie than a political act, Fast Food Nation aims to disseminate its counter-propaganda to the widest possible audience, which is the only plausible reason why the book has been shoehorned into a narrative instead of a documentary.
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63Fast Food Nation would have benefited from a longer running time -- the movie often feels like it's missing big chunks of plot -- but Linklater's cautionary message gets through.
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63Presenting facts in a wrapper of fiction only muddies the waters, and many of the film's subtler points are likely to slip by viewers who haven't first read Schlosser's book. Other salient points are shoehorned into the dialogue, rendering key scenes preachy, heavy-handed and dramatically inert.
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63One of the great frustrations associated with Fast Food Nation is the way it drops subplots.
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60A gross and engrossing attempt to humanise a hot-button subject, using a star-sprinkled cast to reveal some unpalatable truths.
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60It gets the job done and then some, but it's ugly and clumsily shaped, and every scene is there to rack up sociological points.
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60Works far better as journalism than as drama. One weakness is that poor Linklater has to keep bringing in guest explainers, who lay out one policy or another but have nothing whatsoever to do with the story.
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50Following up on Morgan Spurlock's wildly successful indie film "Super Size Me," critics of fast food were hoping that a one-two punch would further raise consciousness among consumers and purveyors alike. Alas, Fast Food Nation is punchless.
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50Dispiriting, unsubtle and unpleasant.
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50For all the filmmaker's good intentions, Fast Food Nation isn't a particularly good movie. It doesn't hold together or grip you the way a documentary might have.
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A frustratingly toothless film whose heart is in the right place even if its head isn't.
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50The movie is designed to stir up controversy. (Linklater and Schlosser have admitted as much.) But can you really stir up controversy with a lesson plan?
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40As a character-driven narrative, it's a hollow beast, too often pedantic, that smacks of good-guy agitprop, shrill when it should be subtle and shrieking when a whisper would be far more unnerving.
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40Even if you swear off burgers forever, it won't make Fast Food Nation's characters come to life.
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40The movie is halfhearted, fragmentary, unachieved.
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12If I wanted to spend $10.75 making myself sick, I'd buy a bottle of cheap tequila.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 8 out of 16
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Mixed: 1 out of 16
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Negative: 7 out of 16
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