The Founder

Michael Keaton has been an important actor in my life. My earliest memory of him is the scene where he battles the blanky-eating vacuum cleaner in MR. MOM. Later, when I was 8, he'd go on to star as the caped crusader in BATMAN, and just a couple of years ago he had a major comeback and a shot at Oscar gold as a washed up actor in BIRDMAN.

So, that's why I went to see THE FOUNDER, starring Keaton as Ray Kroc, the guy who ripped off the guys who founded the biggest fast food chain ever, McDonalds. THE FOUNDER was written by Robert Siegel, the genius behind THE WRESTLER, and directed by John Lee Hancock the... director who directed THE BLIND SIDE.

As the movie opens, Kroc is pounding the pavement as a milkshake machine salesman, striking out at shitty burger joint after shitty burger joint before receiving an order for eight (eight!) milkshake machines from place called McDonald's in San Bernardino. Kroc's gotta see what kind of shitty burger stand needs eight milkshake machines, so he hits the road and finds McDonald's is anything but shitty. It's clean, family-friendly, and perhaps best of all, fast.

The brothers who own the place (Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch) give Kroc a tour of the custom-designed kitchen, a model of assembly-line efficiency, and the wheels start turning in Kroc's brain. What if he could franchise these places? He'd make a fortune! At first the brothers are hard sells -- how do you keep up quality control when you've got restaurants all over the country? But eventually they give in and Kroc's off to the races.

Of course, you probably know where this is going. Slimy salesman Kroc dreams big and is persistent, and the down home McDonald brothers are naive and eventually get taken advantage of. It isn't long before Kroc is willing to cut corners to maximize profits, and why shouldn't he? He's a business man. Still, the McDonald brothers aren't really in it for the money and wonder why anyone would bother having lots of shitty restaurants when they could have one good one.

These three central characters, Kroc and the McDonald brothers, carry the movie. Keaton is fascinating as Kroc, simultaneously sympathetic and disgusting, and Offerman and Lynch also pull double duty as convincingly idealistic while also being frustratingly stubborn. The production design is also nice, setting the movie convincingly in the 50s and 60s and using a lot of the famous McDonalds iconography to great effect, like the arches, to great effect. You're going to want a quarter pounder and some fries after seeing this movie.

All that said, the story is predictable and too much of it is told rather than shown. Still, the pros mostly outweigh the cons and while THE FOUNDER won't blow your mind, it's worth a watch for the performances.

Although the casting of Keaton is the single best thing about this movie, it is also the most distracting thing. At 65, Keaton is over 10 years older than Kroc was at the time the movie begins, and one of his best assets -- his face -- betrays this inconsistency in closeup after closeup. This is just a minor gripe, though. If I was making a movie about a 52-year-old and Michael Keaton wanted to be in it, I'd be like, "Yes, please."