madhattertx Review of Chef

Chef (2014)

A movie you want to like, but it stabs you in the back with a chef knife

[3/10 · 23 October 2014]

I wanted to enjoy this film and have it live up to its hype, but I couldn't. I thought I might be watching a homage to food like "Sideways" was to wine, but the last minute was written like like Favreau was running out of ink or paper for his script. It starts out fine, but after the Chef is fired/quits/takes the night off after the bad review, he goes home and preps all this great food. I thought he intended to invite the critic to eat this food, but instead he goes back to the restaurant without the food and screeches at him at the top of his lungs. Wha? Then, I get the buddy/father/son road trip across country in the food truck. I'm thinking "Sideways"...then they get to LA and the last minutes of the movie derail this movie completely: the critic loves the food truck food a little too much & offers Chef a job at his restaurant. Wait a second: the owner of the first restaurant promised Chef total food control too & later changed their deal so Chef would cook only what the owner wanted. So, I thought the food truck was about having sole control again. Nope: chef decides to accept the deal and enter into another deal working for somebody else, just like how he started at the first restaurant. That makes no sense. The food truck vanishes in an instant to be replaced by the restaurant and we see the chef married to his ex-wife for only the sole reason that she inadvertently blurted out she loved her ex a couple minutes earlier in the film. Wait, what? This could have been a 10 movie, if only Favreau had focused on what the premise of the movie was supposed to be: a chef in love with cooking standing on his own two feet and succeeding. Instead, I'm left with the impression that this movie was more a statement about the good/evil of using social media (mainly Twitter). Maybe the movie should have been called "Cyberbully"?