REVIEW: Chef

6/10 - Are you hungry? You will be...

Chef is part passion project and part paint by numbers. Writer and director and star Jon Favreau created this film about how leaving his job as head chef in a well respected restaurant brought his family together to help him launch a food truck.

It's actually quite a good film. There's plenty of heart with a touching relationship between father and son, and lots of support from the friends and family in the supporting cast. It's beautifully shot with exquisite scenes of cooking that will certainly leave any audience drooling, I also like the integration of technology in this film. Often movies that try to utilize social media come across like an advertisement. In this case, the web is part of the universe we all live in, with both real implications and the ability to walk away from it. The focus stays on what's important, without getting too involved in tricky explanations.

I cannot say I particularly loved this movie. There's something bizarre about the plot that frustrated me as a viewer. This is meant to be a story about bottoming out, and finding what's really important. He embarks in a much smaller venture, cooking out of a food truck with his family. My problem is how he got to that point. Jon Favreau doesn't seem to like conflict. Scene after scene, characters are trying to lift up Carl, characters that shouldn't help him are going out of their way to help him.

There's a point halfway through the film where Favreau's Iron Man buddy makes a one scene appearance as the eccentric ex-husband of Carl's ex-wife. After some circular discussion, Chef Carl Casper walks out with a food truck. Seriously. Someone is going to have to explain that to me. It's like a bizzaro-world version of the Ex-Wives Club formed in the middle of this movie and through the magic of cinema, Carl got to move forward with his dream.

That's exactly the sort of thing I hate seeing in a movie. An entertaining scene is still not good if it's pushing forward an illogical plot. What's the message being presented here? Carl didn't have to work to get what he wanted. Was it meant to illustrate that buttering up to the first husband of his ex-wife is the same as relying on family? It's just so disjointed and improbable to me that it makes me out of the movie.

For a film written by, directed by, and starring the same person, it's surprisingly well paced. There's a lot of charm and chemistry between the cast which bails it out of some of the more improbably exposition scenes. It's a movie universe you want to live in, for more reasons then just the food.

IMDb - Chef (7.3)
Wikipedia - Chef
Rotten Tomatoes - Chef (88%)
Amazon.ca - Chef