There was a shred of hope that Searchlight Pictures’ “The Menu” could be a sleeper hit for 2022. Whatever hope this film had died the second Adam McKay and Will Ferrell became the producers of this movie.
Last year, Adam McKay released a “satire” on climate change deniers called “Don’t Look Up” which was one of the smuggest and most pretentious movies released last year. If there’s one thing that Adam McKay films are known for it’s being smug and pretentious.
As someone who has reviewed a lot of bad movies in 2022, ‘The Menu’ may be the single dumbest movie that I’ve seen so far this year. A story about an exclusive restaurant that only the most privileged of the privileged can attend.
When a group of wealthy individuals attends what they believe to be a once-in-a-lifetime culinary experience, things take a turn for the worst when they realize that the chef has a plan for everyone attending tonight and that the end result is going to be deadly.
“The Menu” is a predictable cinematic experience that you can figure out within the first three minutes. Whenever a film inserts Progressive story tropes into the plot it becomes predictable and you can accurately guess exactly where it is going. The cast is full of a bunch of rich and entitled elitists with unlikable personalities offering audiences absolutely no one to root for the jump.
However, the one character who is supposed to be our saving grace is the character Margot played by Anya Taylor-Joy. Margot is just as unlikable as any other character, but she is presented as an outsider, someone who isn’t wealthy, and someone who isn’t impressed by the world of fine dining. This makes her the de-facto protagonist which is the central flaw of the film.
If the only person they were supposed to identify with is a rude and arrogant protagonist whose only redeeming quality is the fact that she’s not rich like the other characters, the entire premise of this movie is dead on arrival.
Whenever Hollywood makes a film about rich people you can always expect there to be some social commentary about classism and why rich people are bad in an attempt to pretend that they can relate to the common man.
The Menu’s attempt at being a black comedy movie makes the entire film feel like one giant cartoon. The characters in the movie feel like they were cut and pasted from several different films with conflicting narratives.
Audiences sit around waiting for the big mystery to be revealed only to find out there isn’t one. There is no twist or greater message the film tries to give you. There isn’t even a good reason our characters are targeted. At one point we find out that one of our character’s moral sins was going to Brown University without racking up any student loan debt.
The film puts all its chips into building a mystery that gives you no payoff in the final act. The ending of this film is one of the dumbest twists in cinema this year that makes the entire journey a big fat waste of time.
The Menu is a film that insults your intelligence while trying to talk down to you simultaneously.
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Sounds like Knives Out only substituting Gordon Ramsey.