I watched
Fast Food Nation at a sneak preview last night. I can't say it was a bad movie, because it wasn't really, but it was somewhat inconsistent.
First of all, it suffered from the same problems as
Syriana. To make it worse, these problems were even more throrough.
The film is about a major fast food chain and its latest feat, a big hamburger that sells like crazy. The company sends out an employee to check out the conditions under which the meat for the burger is produced and goes to Colorado, where the cattle farms are situated. The reason why he is sent out is because independent studies found out the meat is contaminated with cow dung.
At the same time, a group of illegal immigrants are transported across the Mexican-US border by Coyotes and end up in the same town in Colorado, and most of them start working in the factory that produces the meat for the burger chain. Finally, at some point in the film, we get introduced to a girl selling the burgers at the local restaurant.
The problem is, that with three storylines in this film, there is no plot. The first storyling about the guy who investigates the factory is suddenly ended in the middle of the film and gets somewhat replaced by the one about the girl, who was introduced way into the film and whom we hadn't even known to be a main character yet.
While we can follow the investigators revealings about the burger production, the poor immigrants developments in their new lives and the girls growing dissatisfaction with her life, at some point in the film, I asked myself: Where is this heading to? At that point, it became incredibly boring because it was all so slow-moving, and instead of seeing any kind of action from the characters, the story unfolds in endless dialogues. I got the feeling that at some point, the filmmakers decided they needed a climax, so they let the girl join a group of activists who try, unsuccesfully, to free the cattle. At the same time, two of the immigrants get wounded by the machines in the factory.
So, the film has good intentions, and it is obvious what it is trying to portray. It even portrays things quite well. But as a movie, it needs a plot to keep things interesting to the viewer. It is simply a dramaturgic delict to introduce interesting characters at the beginning only to drop them in the middle. You can have as many funny cameos by Bruce Willis as you like, if it only serves a storyline that
might have been an interesting plot but simply stop to be replaced by two painfully melodramatic and slumberously slow, and let's say it, boring ones, it's pointless.
Needless to say, the three storylines aren't woven together, They touch at certain points, but they don't have anything to do with each other. This just isn't dramaturgy.