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FLAMIN' HOT
Director: Eva Longoria Cast: Jesse Garcia, Annie Gonzalez, Dennis Haysbert, Matt Walsh, Tony Shalhoub, Emilio Rivera, Bobby Soto, Pepe Serna MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:39 Release Date: 6/9/23 (Hulu; Disney+) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 8, 2023 Movies—even the ones based on real-life events—aren't going to tell the whole truth. That's a simple fact of drama in general, because it's impossible and not particularly useful to replicate life on the screen, the stage, or the page. All of this is to talk around the fact that the foundational story of Flamin' Hot apparently isn't true, but it's also to offer a bit of leeway in regards to that. The story of Richard Montañez, who genuinely did rise through the ranks of a major snack food company to go from working on a plant floor to earning an executive position, became fiction as soon as Lewis Colick and Linda Yvette Chávez wrote their screenplay. It was going to play loose with the facts, the people, and the order and specifics of various events, because the script and director Eva Longoria's resulting movie were going to tell a story, not mirror life in some exact and exacting way. If the real Montañez played up his own legend in the book he wrote and his own telling of his life story (Both receive credit as source material for the screenplay), that's his prerogative, and it's just bad luck for the filmmakers that they accepted those stories as true before evidence emerged to counter the boldest claim of their own telling of Montañez's story. We can't blame them for that. We can, though, find the resulting movie to be unconvincing, even beyond the claims that probably aren't true within it. That's entirely on the screenwriters and Longoria, making her narrative feature debut. They become so caught up in the process of their protagonist's unlikely success that they speed through it and past anything that might have helped ground this tale in anything other than presenting us with a sequence of events. In it, Richard (Jesse Garcia) is a man who has grown up believing that his opportunities are limited. Of Mexican heritage, Richard grew up on a labor camp for migrants in California, dealt with a father (played by Emilio Rivera) who constantly belittled him, and had at least one run-in with the cops, after making some money at school by selling burritos to his classmates, that made him skeptical of being able to make an honest living. It comes as little surprise to learn that the real Montañez has become a motivational speaker, given how the narration provided by his fictional version reduces the difficult honesty of his upbringing to some jokes and clichés. After dropping out of high school, Richard becomes involved in a local gang that, among other things, sells drug around the neighborhood, but after marrying Judy (Annie Gonzalez) and starting a family, he decides to make a steady, honest, and less dangerous living. Eventually, that lands him at a janitorial position at a nearby Frito-Lay plant, where he hopes to rise through the ranks by learning about the floor's machinery from engineer Clarence (Dennis Haysbert). Instead, the not-so-trickling-down economy of the 1980s devastates the plant's work force, putting Richard and all of his co-workers' futures at risk. In theory, all of this is authentic. It's after that, as Richard comes up with an idea to introduce a spicy variety of the company's assorted snacks in order to appeal to the untapped market of Hispanic and Latin American customers, when the account apparently veers from reality. Again, let's give the movie the benefit of the doubt that it's not intending to be fully authentic to everything that actually happened. Even so, the story here loses sight of what's broadly a believable working-class tale about one man, his family, and his friends and co-workers coming upon hard times and struggling to keep things going. Instead, it's all about Richard, who becomes a singular expert in spicy recipes and marketing and business practices in general as the events of this plot require him to do so. Even if Montañez's tale hadn't come under some scrutiny recently, it would difficult to buy just how quickly and reliably this character adapts to concepts he has never considered, as well as how conveniently so many fortunate circumstances surround him. Tony Shalhoub plays the company's CEO, presented as a generous provider of opportunity—regardless of, you know, all of those layoffs setting the entire plot in motion. The movie's feel-good philosophy is its guiding principle, and it flies in the face of everything that gets the story to that point. The main problem, perhaps, is that the story being told here—of a company finding a new way to sell junk food to even more people—isn't especially compelling (There's a strange moment in which the local gang uses their strategy for selling drugs to peddle bags of crispy, greasy snacks in low-income neighborhoods, and somehow, no one involved in the movie seems to realize the seemingly on-the-nose implications of that, since it's played as just a gag). In addition to probably being a bunch of bunk in reality, Flamin' Hot is dramatically inconsistent, which is a much more significant issue. Copyright © 2023 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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(for some strong language and brief drug material)
