A prefix menu builds from tantalizing appetizer through hearty main course to palate cleansing dessert. “The Menu” menu does not.
What we want is a rich, propter hoc meal full of nuanced flavor. What we get is a serviceable but ultimately not so well done, well done hunk of meat.
Ralph Fiennes plays the impresario of a fine dining experience for the most elite of guests on a remote island. They call him Chef. His character has more in common with the sadistic SS Commandant he plays in “Schindler’s List” than with anyone you’ve seen on the Food Network.
The conceit is right there in the trailer. Rich people run around a violent rat trap set by a psychopath chef. It’s exactly the movie you expect. Subversions? Twists? Turns? No. The courses don’t build off one another. It’s the same class warfare moralizing tepid torture over and over. It’s your Rachel Ray-loving Grandma’s version of “Saw.”
It’s not terrifying enough to be an effective horror movie. Not funny enough for a comedy. And it’s not smart enough to be elevated in either genre.
Here are two scenes that instantiate the failure of the film as both a comedy and horror movie. Fiennes’s Chef curates a twisted eating experience to teach his patrician diners a lesson. Soliloquizing to his victims, as movie villains are wont to do, he quotes Martin Luther King. Ironic. Funny even, if left at that. A Black diner looks dumbfounded at the tone deafness. Ok, we get it. Another diner gives a “he really just quoted MLK.” Seriously, we GET it. Another diner follows suit. It’s a movie so committed to ruining its own jokes. Take a cue from the film’s subject: if you leave something in the oven too long it gets burnt.
On the horror front, we too get seared to oblivion. In what is supposed to be a shocking initiation into the violence and insanity of Chef’s game, a predictable dud kicks off the mayhem. Chef lays out white plastic sheets. He invites his sous chef out to present a dish called “the mess.” He berates the man, humiliating him by listing off his failures, intimating that his life is not worth living. I wonder what he induces the man to do to shock his audience given what has physically and emotionally been set up? We know the punchline as we wait for the buildup to get over with.
The comedy/horror mashup might have worked had this been a delightfully campy affair with guts and one-liners galore. This, however, is decidedly not that.
Fiennes and Anya Taylor Joy are always a treat to see light up the screen. The movie is competently directed by HBO mainstay Mark Mylod (“Succession,” “Game of Thrones”). But there’s no auteurship that brings “The Menu” beyond a watchable, yet forgettable episode of an anthology horror series you might see on TV.
It’s an easy to swallow movie — you won’t spit it out — but nothing to rave about on Yelp.
