Every once in a while I watch a movie that is both beloved and highly regarded by other people with generally good taste AND in the genre/style of film I tend to watch, but just does not Spark Joy for me. This movie is one of those instances. It is certainly "good." It is well-crafted for the most part, it establishes tension and suspense, it sets some interesting scenes, clearly establishes characters, and so on and so forth. I am going to give it a good score, because it is good!

So why didn't I love it? Writing this review is a bit of an exercise in trying to figure that out, for me. Is it that I feel offended as a foodie that I am the target of the ridicule? No, I have notoriously simple food tastes. I love the Bread of the Common Man. I certainly don't eat oysters and admire vineyards for their wine pairings, and I have a well-known grudge against the kind of pretense in writing and description that seems to exist to elevate the writer's intellect rather than to actually communicate any ideas. I feel no kinship to any of the rich (nor does the movie want me to).

I don't really feel any kinship with the "serving class" of the restauranteur and company either, though, which the movie does want - perhaps that is one minor nit I can pick. He is surely an ultra-rich man himself, and certainly part of the upper social stratum. The movie probably even knows this, given the intentional reverence and servitude of his workers toward him as things play out. But it doesn't really want you to know this; it doesn't necessarily want you to root for Chef Jigsaw, but it does want you to at least be sympathetic to him despite his obvious problems.

Maybe this is the issue I have that keeps the film short of greatness; it can't really decide what it wants to say, and has no particularly clear ideas that do not fall apart entirely if you deconstruct them. Like a bread plate without bread, it gives you some flavors to try (a little of Squid Game's anti-capital, a dash of Saw's idea of justice, etc) but it does not actually tie anything together in any sort of cohesive way. On the surface it works, of course. It just sets up a bunch of bad guys to eat their just desserts, and a classic grey "villain" a la Darth Vader who receives some measure of personal redemption but for whom it is personally too late, and just dispatches it with panache and style. But it doesn't really interrogate how or why any of these people exist or any of the forces that drive them here or present any solutions, and it doesn't want you to do that either. It makes the final message be about food, even though the entire movie is also about how the food itself doesn't matter!

Ultimately, perhaps the lesson it is trying to impart is the very surface-level message the film expresses, which is that I should be content with a simple cheeseburger of a movie, which doesn't have to have any fabricated bullshit "meaning" beyond "here are some characters, watch them interact in this well-crafted way," and so I should just accept it as a suspenseful horror comfort film and not demand that it be anything more. Perhaps it is I, the audience, who have failed.

Score: 6/10

IMDb: The Menu

PS: This movie has a long way to go to surpass my favorite movie about a celebrity chef, the incredible God of Cookery (Stephen Chow), one of the rare 9/10 movies for me. If only this movie had the bizarre earnestness of that masterpiece. The Menu may be approximately on par with my favorite movie about everyone dying due to food, though (The Platform).