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In 2004, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock made waves with his hugely successful documentary, Supersize Me.
The Oscar-nominated film, which saw the director’s health suffer immensely as he lived off giant McDonald’s meals for a month, exposed many people to the unsavory reality of fast food.
(He lost the excess weight he gained during the movie and regained his health by following a plant-based diet for some time – but that’s another story).
So when Spurlock decided to follow-up his super successful food industry film – how did he fare?
Chickens
The new movie – Supersize Me 2: Holy Chicken – concentrates (as the title suggests) on chickens. More precisely, Spurlock attempts to open a fast food chicken joint, and uncovers some secrets of the food industry en route.
According to one critic, he fails miserably.
Writing for The Guardian, Charles Bramesco claims: “[Spurlock’s] latest endeavor… places him at the center of the film once again.
“But this time, his journey doesn’t send him to the ends of experience. Instead, he goes on a smug odyssey of know-it-all-ism that yields a scant few factoids we didn’t already learn from his first film.”
Impact
According to The Guardian, the film does have some impact, and this is when Spurlock exposes ‘patently evil practices from the seemingly nefarious folks at Purdue and Tyson’.
Bramesco writes: “Among the more shocking revelations mined from industry nitty-gritty: that the terms ‘all natural’ and ‘free-range’ mean bupkus, that it is absurdly easy to con the USDA into certifying subpar meat (mostly because they don’t give a damn), and most affecting of all, that chicken manufacturers are systematically suffocating the farmers that purchase and raise the birds.”
Despite this, the critic ultimately decides the film has one main issue: “Spurlock’s urge to follow up on Super Size Me didn’t have to be a bad idea… [unfortunately] this is all really about not chicken, but ego.”
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