As John Lee Hancock’s (Saving Mr. Banks, The Blind Side) progressed, I couldn’t help compare his lead character Ray Kroc (played by Michael Keaton – Spotlight, Birdman) to, perhaps, the most iconic television figure in the last 25 years. But, of course, I’m talking about Walter White from the AMC series Breaking Bad. Now the founder of The McDonald’s Corporation certainly didn’t go to the extremes that Walter White did when he transferred himself from a quiet high school chemistry teacher to a ruthless, cutthroat drug Kingpin, intent on destroying everything in his path by any means necessary to get what he wants. Nevertheless, Hancock’s version of Kroc felt similar in the sense that when we meet him, he is a man of integrity, doing whatever he can within the confines of the law to make a living. But, by the end of the film, he is an entirely different man, caught up in his greed, power, and wealth. But, like White, he reaches a point where he feels that he is virtually invincible to those around him as well as to the laws of the land. And just like Breaking Bad, The Founder becomes a must-watch.

I knew a little about the story of McDonald’s going into this movie. I had seen some documentaries in the past and, of course, like everyone else in this country, I’ve eaten there numerous times over the course of my life (side note: we learn at the end of this movie that McDonald’s feeds 68 million people each day or 1% of the world’s population). I’ve seen features on the history channel about Ray Kroc, but I’m a person who is always going to be more captivated by a movie than I am a documentary. This wasn’t exactly a movie I asked for or any of us needed, but boy was it informative and entertaining. It was so far off my radar that I had completely forgotten that it was even a 2016 release. But, suddenly, I may need to reconsider my end-of-year top movie list. I think it’s a movie that will be on the outside looking in, but it certainly needs consideration. It’s not that The Founder is going to blow you away. But it will tell you a nice little true story that is certainly going to keep you entertained the entire time and one which you will never feel lost in because of the topic being so familiar to you. This won’t be the third-best picture in three years that stars Keaton, but, as good as he was in Spotlight and Birdman, I felt this was his finest performance ever in a film.

McDonald’s is one of the most family restaurant establishments of all time and is also a very charitable organization, giving tens of millions of dollars each year. While a $40 million donation may seem like a lot, this company reports a profit of over $5.5 billion each year. Organizations like The Ronald McDonald House are known throughout the United States. When we think of McDonald’s, words like golden arches, fast, cheap, children, drive-thru, family, fun, convenient, etc. There are some negative connotations associated with it, but not more than you would hear associated with other fast-food restaurants. Personally, I don’t eat there anymore because of issues it does to me internally, but I don’t recall very many bad experiences when I was growing up.

***A little background about the movie…it’s the plot basics…not necessary to read if you don’t want to***

The Founder is excellent. You get it all in under two hours. You learn all about Kroc. You learn all about the McDonald’s Corporation. And you learn all about the original restaurant, a little standalone operation located in San Bernardino, California that was started by two brothers named Dick (Nick Offerman – NBC’s Parks and Recreation) and Mac (John Caroll Lynch – Zodiac, Shutter Island), two honest men who revolutionalized the food industry in 1954 by offering good food fast, near perfection standardization, and takeout service so that you could take your meal and eat it wherever you liked. These three concepts we completely take for granted now and may even wonder how it even took until 1954 to develop something so easy. That wasn’t the mindset back in the 1950s. As we learn, there were many drive-in restaurant chains where the carhops would take your order and then bring your food to you while you waited in your car. Dick and Mac saw the inherent problems with this (slow service, need for a large staff, customers getting incorrect orders, dishes getting lost or broken, cleanliness issues, it attracted too many teenagers just looking to hang out) and saw a means to correct this. It was Dick’s dream to work in the film business. And the brothers accomplished this…but this was in 1929, and The Great Depression caused them to shut down. They then opened a food stand that sold various items from hamburgers to hot dogs, barbecues, and juices. They realized that a great majority of their sales were coming from just three items (hamburgers, french fries, and milkshakes) and decided to focus on just these three items. This is where Ray comes in. As milkshake mixer salesman for a company called Prince Castle, his job was to travel the Midwest, trying to get these very drive-in owners to buy a multi-mix milkshake machine rather than the single milkshake machine these places currently possessed. His message was that people weren’t ordering milkshakes, not because they didn’t want them, but because they knew it took too long to get their order when they ordered them at these drive-in places. These owners quickly dismissed him. So when he got a call that a single stand wanted at first six, but then eight, of these multimixers, he had to find out why.

So in 1955, Ray Krock met brothers Dick and Mac McDonald at their McDonald’s stand-in San Bernardino and learned all about their operation. Each hamburger (or cheeseburger) came with equal squirts of ketchup and mustard, two pickles, and a dash of onions (ironically, that is still the formula used today at McDonald’s). Ray saw the efficiency of the restaurant. Everyone had their purpose. Dick designed the restaurant itself in an assembly line type way where efficiency was key. The food workers could get the meal to the customers in under a minute using their formula. Ray was entranced by this and wanted to learn even more. Particularly, he wanted to know why they hadn’t franchised the operation yet. The brothers explained that they tried. They opened up three other restaurants in southern California and one in Phoenix, Arizona. The one in Phoenix was of particular interest to Ray after seeing a picture of it in the brothers’ office that featured the golden arches that we still associate with McDonald’s today. But just the two of them couldn’t control the standardization of those operations, and those stores’ inability to maintain the standards they had set was tainting their brand. The brothers valued quality, family-friendly environments, and happy customers more than they did the bottom line. Sure they wanted to make money. This was their job. This was their livelihood. Both worked the San Bernardino each day. But these men weren’t greedy. They made a nice living, and they were secure. Plus, Mac had many health issues, and the stress of anything more worried both of them.

Still, Ray was persistent. And he suggested that they franchise the restaurants again. Ray would take control of the operations in the Midwest, based upon a contract drawn up by his lawyer and the lawyer of Dick and Mac that would ensure standardization, brand recognition, quality, etc. The McDonald brothers would be silent partners and receive just .5% of profits, while Ray would get 1.4%. A majority of would go to the franchise owners who Ray handpicked. Unfortunately, his first attempt at finding the right franchise owners backfired in a major way, and he had to look again at the type of person he wanted running each store. And while the franchises were doing well within the community and the golden arches were becoming recognized regionally, most of them did not see the profit Ray had hoped to see. Part of it had to do with costs (such as refrigeration costs associated with keeping the ice cream cold for milkshakes), while part of it had to do with the franchise owners earning too much profit.

But the problem was that there was a signed contract that stated the profits entitled to each party and any changes in the business needing to be approved by the McDonald brothers. Ray didn’t like this, though. Some of the decisions needed to be made on the fly, and it often took weeks or months for any resolution. Plus, Ray believed that he and the brothers were not making the money they were entitled to. The franchise owners would still be making huge sums of money even if they had adjusted the contract. But Dick and Ray were not in it for the money. They never were. They agreed to the contract they signed so that more people like them could experience the success that they experienced. It wasn’t good enough for Ray. He began cutting corners wherever he could. He broke the contract by replacing the milkshakes with Instamix (basically a flavored packet with water that tasted the same), which reduced the need for refrigeration. He broke the contract in other ways, angering the McDonald brothers every step of the way. He continued to believe he was untouchable and was no longer scared of breaking the contract because he knew that the brothers didn’t have the resource to fight him.

***End of Background***

The Founder is rated PG-13, but very could be PG with just a slightly toned-down approach. There was some language that could have been eliminated. While there wasn’t any real sexual innuendo, there was a suggestion of adultery. We don’t see anything beyond Kroc being at first infatuated and later flirting with a married woman named Joan (Linda Cardellini – Daddy’s Home, Welcome to Me), who is the husband of Rollie (Patrick Wilson – Little Children, Insidious), a successful restaurant owner and new McDonald’s franchise owner in the Minneapolis area. Ray’s fascination with Joan seemed odd because women/relationships/sex didn’t really seem of any interest at all to him until he laid eyes on her for the first time. Still, this was an integral part of the story, and maybe that’s exactly how it played out in real life for him (Note: that we don’t always know what happens with our movie characters in their private lives…Ray seemed to spend a lot of time on the road, but there was never any hint of an extra-marital affair.

Likewise, his relationship with his wife Ethel (Laura Dern – Wild, Marriage Story) was terse at times, but when he said out of the blue that he wanted a divorce, it seemed out of character and random. I never felt there was any real love between the couple. She did support him in his failed business ventures, and she supported him with this one even though she had her trepidations. But, as he was with other parts of the story, the more his ego was fed, the more, too, was his belief that he was invincible. McDonald’s was doing so well that he was willing to give her everything (the house, the cars, their savings accounts), but she couldn’t have a dime of what he made from the company. He knew he would be able to replace everything he was going to lose in a matter of no time at all. It further showed that the more undercutting Ray did to pad his bank account, the further he got away from the ideals he possessed at the start of this movie. After he had claimed all of the rights for McDonald’s after buying the brothers out, he went so far as to try and change the company’s history, saying that he came up with a lot of the ideas that the brothers started.

This is a fantastic movie with an incredible performance by Keaton. Offerman and Caroll Lynch were terrific in roles that I’ve never seen them in before. The McDonald brothers represented the social conscience of the movie. They tried to do the right thing from the moment we met them (and before) all the way to the end. Unfortunately, while they were rewarded for their contributions to the fast-food industry (standardization, limited menus, ordering food from a window, packaging, branding) with a blank check where they asked for $1 million each after taxes, they missed out on hundreds of millions of dollars that they would have been entitled to if Ray had honored the 1% of profits he promised them in a handshake agreement). And Ray went so far as to set up his 100th McDonald’s restaurant right across from their original stand, forcing the brothers to close their now named “The Big M” forever. And, later, he even took credit for inventing some of the things that Dick and Mac came up with.

Ultimately, when we think of McDonald’s, we think of Ray Kroc and not Dick or Mac McDonald. Is Kroc an American success story? Of course, he is. But the way that he went about it shows us all about the dirty underside of American business. Kroc bullied his way into getting what he wanted by amassing huge amounts of money while securing the best lawyers in the country. As a result, Dick and Mac couldn’t fight the contract breach because they would have been overwhelmed by the court costs alone. And, unfortunately, that seems to be the American way in so many different avenues. We all want to sue each other when we AREN’T really wronged. And when we are wronged, and we want to sue, the guilty party can often say, “Go ahead and sue me. I’ll eat you up in court costs alone.” It’s rather sad.

I loved this movie. Michael Keaton was the right man for the part as his renaissance continues. I’m hoping it doesn’t end when he returns to the lead role in Beetlejuice 2. See this movie, though it’s not really necessary to see it on the big screen.

As I screen the final movies of the year, I continue to say that 2016 has not been the best year for movies, but it has been a pretty good year for the biopic. The Founder further exemplifies that point.

Plot 10/10
Character Development 10/10 (Keaton does a masterful job of transforming a character from a version of himself at the start of the film to a completely different one at the end)
Character Chemistry 9.5/10
Acting 9.5/10 (Keaton has never been better…and great character roles for Offerman and Lynch)
Screenplay 9.5/10
Directing 9.5/10 (I love movies where you are entertained and informed the whole time, but your brain isn’t challenged…this was one of those movies)
Cinematography 9/10
Sound 9/10
Hook and Reel 9.5/10
Universal Relevance 10/10
95.5%