Mark Reviews Movies: SUPER SIZE ME 2: HOLY CHICKEN!

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 5, 2019

It wasn't much of a shock to learn that eating copious amounts of fast food would be detrimental to your health, but filmmaker Morgan Spurlock went ahead and, in uncomfortable detail, showed us anyway in Super Size Me. That was 15 years ago, and for all of the questionable elements of Spurlock's debut film (Do people actually eat fast food for three meals a day, and isn't the film really just an excuse for the filmmaker to indulge in gluttony for a month?), it certainly did start an important conversation about health, diet, the kind of stuff that companies put in their food, what the caloric content of all that food on the menu actually is, and all sorts of things.

That conversation led to change. That's what the fast food business and the food industry in general wanted us to think, at least. Surely, we can see it—in the way that restaurants now list the calories of their products on the menu, in the rise of "healthy" alternatives that promise "fresh" food, in the fact that every fast food place acknowledges that people want transparency. One can even see it in the number of documentaries that have come after Spurlock's, which were much more interested in diving into the science of diet and the dirty secrets of the food industries than in a flashy, disgusting stunt.

Over a decade later, Spurlock joins that long list of investigative documentaries that followed his first film. In Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!, he examines if the supposed change to industry, which he helped to propel, is real or just a bunch of B.S. marketing. To do so, we get yet another stunt as the central gag of the film: He's going to open a fast food joint of his own.

It's a good gag, although you can see the punch line coming almost immediately. The more vital component of this sequel's success is how Spurlock takes us through the assorted processes that it takes to open a restaurant. There's the matter of location, obviously. There's determining what kind of food people will buy, and from there, it's also a matter of finding a unique angle to selling that product. The restaurant has to look nice, of course, and as a bonus, you can also design the building in such a way—through signage and colors—that people think they're eating healthy food. They're chewing up about half a day's worth of calories from a single sandwich, but the mind sees what it wants to see.

Watching Spurlock visit various marketing people and a company that creates food items for all the major chains and talking about color schemes with design folks, one might notice a bit of a gap in the plan of the filmmaker/amateur restaurateur: What about the food itself? That's a big part of the film, as Spurlock starts farming chickens with the help of a farmer working for one of the companies that's a part of what the filmmaker dubs "Big Chicken." When it comes to the actual preparation of the restaurant, though, it's rather disconcerting how infrequently the matter of the actual food being served comes up in conversation.

There are many uncomfortable truths revealed in this film, which Spurlock presents with the deadpan irony of his professional trickster persona. He's so good at the shtick, in fact, that there are multiple times we might start to wonder if the filmmaker has sold out on his ethical standards. After all, one of the major selling points of his new restaurant will be the man himself—the man who took on the fast industry. Surely, he would never betray the idea that made him famous.

Watching him talk to the marketing folks, he often appears to buy into the scheme himself. The food doesn't matter anywhere near as much as how a restaurant or company goes about selling it to the public. It can be the unhealthiest piece of deep-fried garbage, but if it has some greens and promises "freshness" and looks relatively healthy in a staged photograph, people will trust whatever claims you make.

That's what the businesses know. It's something we've known for a while, too, but to see the entire process at work, including how the marketing people think they can use Spurlock's dedication to the truth as a selling point (not as a, you know, example of how they should actually sell his food), is still enlightening.

While all of that happens (including Spurlock taking a tour of various fast food chains—yes, even the one that he binged on for a month, making his first return to the joint in over a decade—to sample the food, which is still the same, and to survey deceptive design elements), the filmmaker also starts raising chickens. While the marketing practices are shady, the actual making of the meat that'll end up in Spurlock's restaurant is just depressing.

These chickens have been bred to be eaten—growing at a rapid rate, which results in assorted health problems (The filmmaker has a veterinarian perform an autopsy on one, so we can see the devastation on the bird in graphic detail). The farmer who lends him a place to do the raising reveals the way that "Big Chicken" turns its farmers (called "growers" now, just to emphasize the focus on potential consumption) against each other, in a "tournament system" form of payment, and into indentured servants, always in debt to the companies.

Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! serves as a reminder that things continue to be the same, especially when everyone tells you that they've changed. As long as we keep buying it, that'll continue.

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