The Founder is the real story of how a local restaurant built around a revolutionary idea became the giant corporation that is today. I always stress out how diffident I am towards movies based on true stories but, since the purpose of this review is to make you decide if spending your money and time on it, I will try to be impartial (spoiler-free is meaningless since it's a true story).
A true story on screen, in my opinion, has to have a wow-effect that adds something that gives me a reason to see the movie and not simply read it on Wikipedia. A few movies succeeded in that and usually Aaron Sorkin (praise the Lord) was involved. To some extent, this movie succeeds in telling the viewer a 60 years old story that probably didn't know. However, before getting into the plot, I must admit that the wow-moments of the film have good intensity but they are very limited in number.
It is the story about two geniuses and a visionary and the film masterfully displays the difference between the two. The geniuses (the McDonald brothers) applied the Henry Ford's ideas to a restaurant's kitchen: hamburgers ready in a matter of seconds, made by an assembly line. The movie is able to catch how amazing is something that nowadays is normal and Michael Keaton displays the astonishment in front of this progress in such a convincing way that the viewer will participate in it. In particular, there is a sequence where they design the McDonald's kitchen that marveled me. The process of creation of such a revolution went through different attempts and I liked a lot the fact that they threw away the previous version completely before moving forward. That sequence catches the revolution and put it in front of your eyes.
The visionary is Ray Kroc: he saw their genius and relentlessly made it the new American symbol. Although the acting is convincing (for example, there is a very human moment coming out of the blue with great power), I didn't feel this character to be properly shaped.
It is a systemic problem of movies based on true stories: a character is shaped by its transitions and such movies are not commonly focused on displaying them properly. The reason is that, if the story really happened, they don't feel the need of explaining why we go from A to B because it is simply how it went. A consequence of that is a third act that lacks rhythm and a character that holds up only thanks to the ability of the actor and not by the quality of the script. Thus we have very dull lines from time to time and (almost) any life-changing decision is just made after 5 seconds of silent staring at the ground in an empty room. Not to mention the cheap sentences that will work on some motivational poster or on a potentially popular tweet.
To give you a taste of how ineffective was the script of the protagonist to me, I just tell that I came out of the theater wondering how incredible was the story of a very minor character (Fred Turner, that went from flipping the burgers to CEO, 75 seconds on screen) rather than thinking about the amazing journey that Ray Kroc did.
A thing that I liked is that it is not a long commercial. For example, using the voice of the McDonald brothers, the movie occasionally makes fun of what McDonald's is today, stressing out the difference in the quality standards.
All that being said, it was not a bad experience to me and I am actually glad to have spent my time to see it. It's a movie that can give a wide spectrum of emotion: it can inspire, it can enrage, it can bore. It is a story that I didn't know and probably would never know without the movie. Thus I overcame my diffidence and wrote this review, but I will not probably remember it for anything in particular.
(Seriously, tho, the kitchen sequence is very cool).
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