The Founder

10/9/2017

**Veni, vidi, vici!** I anticipated another inspiring biopic about a man who built an empire. That's partially true, because this was inspired by the right kind of wrong thing. I mean it was not actually about the McDonalds' story, the McDonald brothers, but the fast food chain McDonald, how the franchise got rapidly spread across the globe and the person behind it. With the film having both good and bad side, it stayed mostly neutral. But due to the main character, you would see too much lean on what seems the reason behind the McDonald's today's popularity. So it's like another typical American founders' story like Apple, Facebook. I mean not the one who found the company with all the hard works, but the one who dived in and took all the credit. Ray Kroc was a traveling salesman an

8/16/2022

**A decent film, although the story told is substantially stilted and made more tense than it actually was.** We all know that the business world is not for boy scouts. As the film's protagonist himself assumes, you have to be prepared for the toughness of competitors and moves that are often disloyal. However, this is precisely why great businessmen are usually people worthy of our disdain: they associate coldness and calculation with intelligence and the cult of the ego, and not infrequently they see other people as numbers or as means of business. McDonald's is undoubtedly a huge, very powerful multinational, and the film reveals how the company was born, at the hands of Ray Kroc, who takes over the company, taking it from the control of the founders – the McDonald Brothers – and

8/19/2022

**Overall : A brilliant telling of a bleak story that left a disappointing flavor in my soul.** I remember the plaque in our McDonalds growing up about its founder, Ray Kroc, but this movie tells a much different story. Suddenly, I am questioning whether or not I should let my two-year-old eat McDonald's anymore! Michael Keaton's relentless portrayal of the opportunistic and duplicitous Ray Kroc is so spectacular that I questioned whether I even liked Keaton. Yet, he is one of my favorite actors! That is just how disheartening the true story of McDonald's' meteoric expansion is. The Founder does an excellent job telling a dispiriting story and does such a thorough job that it leaves a bad taste in your mouth at the end (pun intended 😉).