THE FOUNDER MOVIE REVIEW
One of 2016’s latest cinematic offerings (and one of 2017’s earliest), The Founder is the story about how the immortalized fast-food chain McDonald’s came to be so starring Michael Keaton, Nick Offerman, and John Carroll Lynch. To say that the marriage of this cast and premise sounds promising is an understatement. It sounds like a surefire hit for both audiences and critics alike, destined to sweep up awards. Unfortunately, it seems as if the filmmakers wrote that on a whiteboard and worked backwards when crafting this project.
Perhaps the two most-commonly discussed and favored biopics in recent memory are David Fincher’s The Social Network and Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs. What they have in common is a director willingly to push the boundaries to make a tight film about their characters and how they impacted the world around them. For the lack of a better word, they’re edgy. But not in the way Zack Snyder is edgy, but innovative. For the sake of this metaphor, John Lee Hancock is a harmless, fluffy sphere. Hancock makes no stamp on this movie, no style, just the implications that the director wanted to make a movie like those aforementioned, both of which written by Aaron Sorkin, known for his snappy, witty dialogue, which this movie has nearly none of. And a movie doesn’t need to have great dialogue. Mad Max: Fury Road has a script that is nothing to write home about (if it even has a script) but it still works because it tells its story in more ways than just by using exposition. This is not to say this movie has only bad writing, either. There’s a scene towards the very end of the film between Michael Keaton and Nick Offerman that is truly phenomenal. The issue here is that it’s not as smart as it thinks it is (if it’s smart at all), and it relies on only that. It’s a tragedy because the film is gifted one of the greatest casts of 2016, and yet still refines them to only saying their lines instead of expressing their character’s emotions visually, which everyone is capable of doing. Several times during the film, I felt bad for John Carroll Lynch. Not his character, but the actor himself, because the lines he was given seemed the most difficult to choke down, and the most bland.
This being said, I did feel bad for both Nick Offerman’s and John Carroll Lynch’s characters, Mac and Dick McDonald. The movie is truly at its best when it spends time with them, which saves this from being a completely boring one, but also exposes a fatal flaw: it chose the wrong character to follow.
The film follows Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton), a salesman who ends up uprooting the McDonald’s business from the McDonald brothers. He is an anti-hero but highly unlikable. Viewers enjoy following the anti-heroes in Goodfellas because they’re characters that can be comedic and carry a cool persona. People know that these gangsters are very very bad people, but they all still like living life of these criminals through the film, something they could never do in real life. It’s sexy. And in Deadpool, audiences enjoy his comedic antics, and in a strange way, forgive him for what he does based on his good intentions and his sorrowful past. Being a salesman is not the same as being a gangster, and the audience doesn’t forgive Ray Kroc for practically robbing the McDonald brothers. I saw this movie in theater with three other people, and all of us came out despising Kroc, but pitying Mac and Dick, despite the natural law of the film saying that they are the antagonists and Kroc is the protagonist.
There’s a strangely edited scene in the first act where the McDonalds explain the history of their restaurant to Kroc, which is full of exposition. With these two aspects present, it becomes abundantly clear that The Founder shouldn’t have been about the greedy Ray Kroc burglarizing the McDonald’s franchise, but an American tragedy about the trials and errors Mac and Dick McDonald had to face to create their restaurant, only to lose it all to someone they helped.
Biopics could be compared to burgers. A good burger is juicy, hearty, and seasoned, not unlike how a proper biopic is juicy with content, hearty with drama, and seasoned with great performances. If John Lee Hancock’s The Founder were a burger, its buns would be made of stale mimicry. Its meat would be succulent and packed with substance, if it were not completely thrown out and wasted. Its sauce would be of an inconsistency birthed from a lack of commitment. But it’s fries are seasoned wonderfully and golden with performances. But fries cannot salvage a meal, which is why The Founder deserves a 4.5 out 10.
★★★★½☆☆☆☆☆