Burnt

Synopsis: Adam Jones (Bradley Cooper) is a two star Michelin chef who destroyed his career with drugs and womanizing. After a three year absence he’s cleaned up his act and is determined to run the best restaurant in London and win his third star.

Burnt is a movie for the Gordon Ramsay/My Kitchen Rules/MasterChef demographic, a meretricious fantasy of culinary perfectionism served up with fetishized kitchen rites and spiced with plate-hurling tantrums.

The main problem lies with the superficial yet heavy-handed screenplay by Steven Knight who no doubt got the job for having penned 2014’s restaurant movie, The Hundred-Foot Journey. Over-stuffed with stock characters, none of whom get their just desserts (OK!, I’ll stop it soon) and hobbled by a perceived need to spell out the messages that we see embodied by the story it is at best a watchable pastiche, at worst a completely redundant one.

These shortcomings are not helped by John Wells’s direction which instead of letting the story simmer (c’mon!) opts for a frenetic pace, with hand-held camera work and rapid-fire editing. One can see why he would have been suckered into this by the nature of the kitchen scenario but there is too much of it.  Only in the latter stages of the film do we get a couple of relaxed scenes but as these are of a sentimental purpose designed to ram home the film’s moral they are hardly endearing.

Although ostensibly a food film, Burnt starts off more like a heist movie, with former drug-addict, pantsman and prima donna chef Jones putting together a hand-picked team from his former incarnation (one is even in prison).  Beyond their names we never learn anything about them.  There are a few obliging expository moments in which Jones’s former bad behaviour is put down to a dysfunctional childhood but we didn’t really need periodic visits to Emma Thompson’s lady psychiatrist for blood tests and a tidy pop-psychological profile of Jones. Nor did we need the periodic appearance of villains pursuing Jones for money owed to their drug-dealing boss (which is paid by a briefly seen Alicia Vikander as his former squeeze).  

While these less-than-gripping sub-plots pop-up periodically all we want really want to do is get back to the kitchen and see those delicious-looking designer dishes being prepared and perhaps watch Jones thaw under the winsome charm of his sous-chef and single mother Helene (Sienna Miller). This doesn’t happen however as Helene frankly doesn’t have what it takes to tame Jones and then there are more distractions for him in the form of Daniel Brühl as his gay employer who has a long-standing crush on him and a rival chef (Matthew Rhys) with whom Jones also seems to have some kind of homoerotic relationship.

Why Bradley Cooper is a mystery. For a start Jones is, I thought, supposed to be English (there is some sob-story he tells Helene about saving his pennies and running away to Paris at the age of nineteen. I can’t recall him saying “from a farm in Kansas”). Cooper is not an actor with a great range and he plays Jones as an obnoxious leather-jacketed culinary rock-star, throwing food up against the wall because the potatoes are not all sliced to exactly 2mm thickness. His staff, however, all submit to his imperious ways (one gets heartily sick of the chorus of "Yes Chef" as Jones rants about a dish being over-cooked by 30 seconds). As the point of the film is that he learns to be a reasonable guy, over the course of the film he tones down this sort of behaviour but that’s it as far as characterisation goes.

Sandra Nettlebeck’s 2001 film Mostly Martha (which was remade as No Reservations by Scott Hicks in 2007) showed in a gender-reversed form what this film might have been. Knight and Wells have presumably seen those films and decided to go in a different direction. In their case, the wrong one. Burnt fills a hole but there’s nothing in it to savour and when it comes to food films that just doesn't cut the mustard.

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