Review of Burnt (2015) by Mrmoviebuff — 14 Mar 2016

More culinary skills are put to the test as the film 'Burnt' tells the story about a chef named Adam Jones (Bradley Cooper) who tries to reverse everything he's done wrong in the past, and serve good food at his own restaurant and achieving that third star.

The film, directed by John Wells is impressively detailed, the structure of seeing all the different fancy restaurants, and the constant close-up shots of different food and ingredients being cut and sliced can make one hungry for that food. In other words, this is essentially food-porn.

But it seems that the food in this movie have better character development than the characters we see and are supposed to care about. While the film is attractive and lavish in terms of its direction and cinematography (by Adriano Goldman), the chefs that we meet are either ultimately bland, or they just don't have enough screen time for us to get really invested in them. Take one chef we meet named Michel (Omar Sy), who apparently used to work alongside Adam in a French restaurant, but that all went down after Adam, idiotically released rats into the kitchen causing health and safety to shut it down. They try to rebuild their friendship when Adam wants to redeem himself after being sober for some 2 years.

Another one we meet named Helene (Sienna Miller) who lives at home with her daughter, we can see that the father is absent, and it seems that Helene cannot balance her work life and personal life. We get the idea that Helene is trying her best to provide for her daughter, but this is a cliche that we have seen in so many other movies.

The person that Adam wants to take over his restaurant is Tony (Daniel Bruhl), but he doesn't trust him due to the fact that his behavior in Paris ruined everything. There seems to be a romantic story going on between these two since Tony seems to be in love with Adam, but this is never further emphasized, and the way it is introduced seemed out of the blue.

The cast in this movie do a great job of fitting into their characters, and Bradley Cooper is good at channeling the Gordon Ramsay type attitude. But why should I care for any of these characters? Adam's backstory is glossed over so heavily, we do not get any flashbacks or some other form of development. Helene has a daughter, and it seems that she is struggling financially, like I said, this has been done in other films, why is this one so different? It's clear that director John Wells loves his food and shows it off beautifully in this film, but there is no sense of care and struggle for these characters. Brad Bird pulled this off extremely well in 'Ratatouille' (2007) combining well developed characters while showing off a love for food.

There is even a scene where we see Adam getting into some trouble with drug thugs, as he owes them money, but this subplot is introduced three times, and, without spoiling too much, let's just say they also gloss over how that won't need to be revisited.

This is an inspired film, but you come to gaze at the delicious food instead of getting invested with these characters, they are all either just angry chefs, nervous chefs, or just young chefs trying to make a name for themselves. The movie is 1 hour and 41 minutes long, I cannot help but feel that if this was a 2 hour movie, maybe more, then we could get some development.