Jesse Garcia
“FLAMIN’ HOT” My rating: C+ (Netflix)
99 minutes | MPAA ratiung: PG-13
It must be a sign of late-stage capitalism, this influx of movies celebrating commercial products.
There’s “Air” (about the creation of the Air Jordan athletic shoe), “Tetris” (about the conquest of the world by a video game), and now “Flamin’ Hot,” the origin story of a mouth-burning variation of Cheetos.
Actually these films aren’t so much about the products themselves as the people who thought them up.
In the case of Eva Longoria’s “Flamin’ Hot” (it’s her directing debut) that would be Richard Montañez, a Mexican American whose rags-to-riches story — laid out in countless motivational talks and a 2021 autobiography — begins with an impoverished childhood and a stint dealing drugs.
After nearly a decade as a janitor in a California FritoLay plant, we’re told, Montañez convinced his bosses to use his homemade spice blend on its products, thus opening up a whole new market: the country’s growing but overlooked Hispanic demographic.
The one-time banger became FritoLay’s director of multicultural marketing. And, like, rich.
As scripted by Lewis Click and Linda Yvette Chavez, the film is equal parts outrage, uplift and comic schtick.
The film is narrated by Montañez (Jesse Garcia), who strains to make a joke of the forces allied against him…much of this dialogue sounds like it was plucked from a second-tier ethnic standup comic. If you don’t think it’s amusing in the first 10 minutes you probably should look elsewhere for entertainment.
We see (briefly) his childhood and his encounters with a violent, disapproving stepfather (Emilio Rivera), his teen years hanging with the neighborhood toughs, and finally his marriage to the ever-loyal Judy (Annie Gonzalez) and his acceptance of a responsible if unglamorous job at the potato chip plant.
Montañez is hard working and ambitious. But we’ve already seen what It’s like to grow up in near poverty in a society that treats you as a second-class citizen, and the factory brass can’t imagine that a lowly broom pusher might have something important to offer.
Still, at home Montañez uses his wife and kids as guinea pigs to perfect his heady blend of traditional Mexican spices. And one day, when he’s sure he has a formula that his fellow Hispanics will gobble up, he risks all by making a phone call to the boss-of-bosses, Pepsico chief Roger Enrico (Tony Shalhoub).
The rest, as they say, is history. Or is it?
A couple of years back The Los Angeles Times looked into Montañez’s claims that he was the inventor of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and reported that according to people who worked for Frito-Lay at the time, the chile-heavy formula was developed by employees in Texas.
Montañez’s genius, apparently, was marketing to his fellow Hispanics and in thinking up new products for the Flamin’ Hot brand (among them a neon orange version of Mountain Dew).
Well, you don’t go to the movies for Gospel truth.
“Flamin’ Hot” is more important for societal reasons than artistic ones. Like the product it celebrates, the film is aimed squarely at Mexican Americans. It’s filled with jokes and observations that will resonate with that audience, as does its celebration of ethnic pride and can-do attitude.
Who can argue with that? Any film that makes a big chunk of the population feel good about themselves should not be too easily dismissed.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 