I purposely chose this out of focus image of the poster not because The Founder is a bad film. It is not. It is brutally honest and worth seeing as a warning for all dreamers who succeed in making their visions a reality. Be careful who you let into your confidence. If a person seems too interested or obsessed or simply too good to be true, he is.
The Founder is done so well that it depresses me and I hope if there is a Hell, Ray Kroc is burning in it for what he did. Normally I don't like the curse when writing a review and I try to avoid spoilers, but if you want to see the film for yourself, stop reading here. My raw spoiler filled emotional response to the film begins after the count down beginning below from five to one. You have been warned.
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Spoilers, Foul Language and an Unedited Emotional Response begins below this line.
The Founder upset and depressed me. Ray Kroc fucked over so many people, including the McDonald brothers and he got away with it. He called those two brothers a bunch of saps. He screwed them out of the one percent royalties they contracted for and are worth about one hundred million a month at the time I am writing this and even opened a McDonalds right across the street so he could drive them out of business after robbing them of the right to use their own name in the business they created.
His admission that if he saw a man drowning who was a competitor, he would get a hose and put it in the mouth of the competitor and watch them drown is possibly one of the most chilling lines I have ever heard in a film.
Ray Kroc knew exactly what he was doing and knew it was wrong, but fucked the brothers over anyway because he could bankrupt them in court fees. He divorced his wife and then refused to give her a share of stock and she was there for him dutifully and deserved a share. He stole a franchise partner's wife and basically became a predator that fed on the carrion of the people who he duped into buying franchises in McDonalds. Basically the film presents a scheme where a person that owns a McDonalds is little more than an employee that pays his bosses' bills because they have to pay the rent since Kroc owns the land every McDonalds is built on. They seem to lose everything if they fail to deliver after being locked into a twenty year lease too. Kroc basically stole every idea the brothers who opened the first McDonalds had for creating an assembly line of fast food with quality and took what others told him about ways in which he could break his contract with the McDonald brothers and used it to fuck them over and others too.
He died a billionaire and the original McDonald brothers still can't even use their own name and after taxes only succeeded in getting one million dollars each.
It depressed me because the film illustrates if one is not capable of being a cut throat then they are doomed to failure and it is hard to argue with that when one looks at successful people in this morally bankrupt world. Creativity, smarts, good intentions, and education all mean shit. If you are ruthless and cunning, you can steal anything.
There were a lot of uncomfortable truths in The Founder that I could not deny. That is why I wondered after seeing it, is there a special place in Hell for a scumbag like Ray Kroc?
(C) Copyright 2017 By Mark A. Rivera
All Rights Reserved.
