John Wells’s restaurant drama has, in its US reviews, already attracted every culinary metaphor imaginable for something that falls just sort of success. It is overcooked. It is neither rare nor well done. It’s a collapsed soufflé. You know the sort of thing.
To be fair, Chef Wells cannot be faulted for presentation. This is a very pretty collation of bourgeois nonsense. Bradley Cooper plays Adam Jones, an archetypal angry cook – Gordon Ramsay, Anthony Bourdain and Marco Pierre White come to mind – who, after recovering from drug addiction, heads for London with a mind to winning three Michelin stars. The film dares to reference Seven Samurai, but the opening sequences, in which he drives about the city recruiting staff, more closely resembles the beginning of a heist movie. This crazy French guy (Omar Sy) can handle sauces and explosives. This amiable Irish bloke (Sam Keeley) knows about deserts and getaway driving. This eccentric lesbian food critic (Uma Thurman) can set up some interference.
A bafflingly large number of very good, very famous actors are photographed in flattering urban light. (Emma Thompson, Alicia Vikander and Sarah Greene join those mentioned elsewhere in supporting roles of various dimensions.) The cooking cast have clearly put in the hours at the hob and Wells lets them show us everything they’ve learned. Sienna Miller, charming as Jones’s sous chef and eventual love interest, chops and stirs with apparent facility. Cooper does things with knives that chefs tend to do.
If you are looking for a film composed of the most beautiful inserts from the world's most lavish episode of Masterchef, then Burnt will suit nicely. Wells has his actors run, motorbike and mope in endless picturesque corners of the West End. The food looks convincing and delicious throughout.
What a shame the picture is so exhaustingly in thrall to cliché. When Bradley visits Thompson's shrink in the opening act and refuses to join an addiction recovery group, we just know that – after a third-act crisis – this is where he is sure to end up with tail between legs. His first deranged meltdown in the kitchen seems wildly out of a character and depends too heavily on our indulging the notion that this is just the sort of thing that top chefs do. How odd that, for the second time this year – after The Second Best Marigold Hotel – a major movie seems to borrow its plot from the Hotel Inspectors episode of Fawlty Towers.
All those whinges whinged, it should be admitted that Burnt, though a bad film, is not at all difficult to sit through. [Insert culinary metaphor here to communicate "guilty pleasure".]
