Burnt

Dir: John Wells

2015

**

2015's Burnt was originally meant as a comedy, I'm not sure why it was decided that it would be better as a drama but I wonder if it would still have been as disappointing. The first fifteen minutes or so are actually rather egg-cellent, like a cross between the A-Team, The Seven Samurai (mentioned in the film) and El Bulli: Cooking in Progress. It started to look rather predictable early on so it was nice when it took another route half-way through but unfortunately the souffle never did quite rise. The cast is great; Bradley Cooper is completely believable as an arrogant and washed up Chef on the brink of a come-back and Sienna Miller as an overworked but underpaid sous-chef. Both performances are at the heart of the film's strength but while Omar Sy, Daniel Bruhl, Matthew Rhys, Riccardo Scamarcio are great performers, their parts are badly written and fall short of their talents. Alicia Vikander and Uma Thurman are robbed of the screen time they deserved and I'm afraid Emma Thompson's rather cartoonish performance as Psychiatrist Dr. Rosshilde is the fault of her performance and how her character was written in equal measure. I think Daniel Bruhl is the actor most wronged by the script, he was perfect as maître d of a posh London restaurant and all was well with his character until they wrote him as being secretly in love with Bradley's world class chef. It was a sub-plot that was excruciatingly embarrassing to watch that made everyone involved look bad. I have to say, I was really expecting more from writer Steven Knight. His feature length directional debut Hummingbird (AKA Redemption) looked great, even though it wasn't a brilliant story, but his 2014 follow up Locke, which he wrote and directed, was absolutely fantastic. He wrote the brilliant Dirty Pretty Things, Eastern Promises and created the amazing TV series Peaky Blinders. Aside from all that, he'd already written an entertaining foodie film with 2014's The Hundred-Foot Journey. There is a certain realism within the story that I admired but it's also rather cliched and actually rather tired. I like a good cookery program but I hate it when they add forced drama, like making a cake is a really a life or death situation. Burnt is essentially all the nonsense without any of the food, the hole in the doughnut rather than the doughnut itself. Personally I don't care who cooks my food in a restaurant, as long as they've washed their hands, it tastes good and it's value for money. I like a bit of show now and again and will pay a little extra for the luxury and the experience but my enthusiasm can only go so far before I start thinking about the shocking waste and all the starvation around the world. If you want a feel-good film that really is about food and passion then I recommend Jon Favreau's 2014 film Chef instead.