Fast Food Nation: Critic Reviews

Naturally, a subject this right-on draws a right-on cast.

The film adaptation of Eric Schlossers best-selling book is far too rich and complicated to be understood as a simple, high-minded polemic.

This movie has taken a firebrand book and turned it into a whingeing piece of defeatism.

Fast Food Nation works far better as journalism than as drama.

Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation is major. It's an angry movie that could shame a Big Mac lover into having a salad.

Fast Food Nation is exotic for being a movie about work. Its characters struggle with some of the world's dirtiest jobs -- morally as well as physically.

No question, these are alarming issues, but I would direct you to Schlosser's book.

Linklater and Schlosser have plenty to say. They just fail to say it cohesively.

Too many story threads are consistently ignored or dropped altogether.

Fast Food Nation gives you much to chew on and much to expel, but at least you'll be sick for a healthy cause.

The fiction that Schlosser and the director Richard Linklater have extracted from the book is a mess, with narrative lines that go astray or simply wind up in the air.

Fast Food Nation works best when it's just hanging out with its far-flung collection of likable, flawed people living off the fat and the lean of the land.

A rambling but potent ensemble piece.

Effectively balanced between the nonfiction muckraking of Eric Schlosser's bestselling expose and the loosely structured character drama of Richard Linklater's adaptation, the film is fascinating food for thought.

They say you don't want to see what goes on behind the scenes in the making of sausage or politics. Fast Food Nation blends the two, and the result may not be a very good movie, but it certainly is effectively disgusting.

[A] sloppy, overarching fiction that tries to do too many things at once. It's like a three-ring circus in which none of the acts is terribly interesting.

In the end, viewers waiting for an emotional and/or dramatic payoff will be disappointed. As a call-to-arms, it's highly sympathetic but surprisingly mild-mannered.

Where's the beef? There is no tasty nutritious plot to chew on, merely lots of cheap info McNuggets meant to be gulped down quickly without thinking too much.

A serious subject; a director who loves to listen to people talk things out; and the nightmare this must have been in the editing booth, play out in front of us in 100 of the longest minutes you might ever spend in a theater.

Unlike the book it's based on, Fast Food Nation won't make you think twice about what you eat. But it may make you think second thoughts about whether it might have made a better documentary.

A frustratingly toothless film whose heart is in the right place even if its head isn't.

To a degree, Fast Food Nation gets the job done, not least because of a harrowing section, late in the film, made up of actual slaughterhouse footage.

Even if you swear off burgers forever, it won't make Fast Food Nation's characters come to life.

One leaves the theater certain what Linklater's theme was but uncertain why it was presented so ineffectively.