"The Founder," which chronicles the takeover and elevation of McDonald's by Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton), is mainly a character study although it also illustrates how vision of the bigger picture can result in the innocent getting hurt. Director John Lee Hancock, working from a script by Robert Siegel, neither lionizes nor demonizes Kroc, revealing all facets of his personality, the laudable, the mundane and the desirable. Kroc was a self-made man who came into his fortune through a combination of good luck, hard work and ruthless persistence. He was a force that didn't let anyone or anything get in his way, including the two naive brothers who entered into a partnership with him to franchise their innovative restaurant.
Today, no one thinks of McDonald's as offering 'good' fast food. But in the beginning, it was viewed as a restaurant and its creators cared about the quality of the hamburgers, fries and shakes they were selling. Their goal was to offer their customers a tasty meal at a cheap price with less than a 30-second wait between ordering and pickup. It was a concept that revolutionized the food industry and whose reverberations are still being felt today. We see what the McDonald brothers (Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch) were striving for, but Kroc was more about growing the business than nurturing it. And we see his dark side: he tosses aside his wife, turns against his partners (eventually bilking them out of hundreds of millions of dollars) and steals the spouse of hone of his investors. Kroc is pure ambition. Nonetheless, "The Founder" is certainly worth seeing and you probably won't think of McDonald's in quite the same way.
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