Flamin’ Hot Review: Frito-Lay Celebrates Itself

Hollywood’s hunger for name brands has officially reached the point where just about any proper noun can become a feature film. And while its breezy pacing and charismatic lead keep it from becoming a slog, there’s no escaping the fact that Eva Longoria’s Flamin’ Hot, which tells the story of how Richard Montañez (Jesse Garcia) went from working as a janitor in a Frito-Lay factory to a director’s position thanks to his invention of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, is simply a 99-minute commercial for the Frito-Lay corporation.

Early on, Lewis Colick and Linda Yvette Chávez’s screenplay emphasizes the hardships that Richard faced along the way. He grows up on a migrant labor camp in Ontario under the watchful eye of his abusive father, Vacho (Emilio Rivera). His school years are beset with racist bullying and his young adulthood quickly leads him into a life of crime. The audience is rushed quickly through this portion of Richard’s life, stopping just long enough to take in a few early lessons about the power that food has to bridge cultural divides. It’s all very simplistic, but it’s delivered swiftly and sweetly enough to mostly make up for the lack of subtlety.

To provide for his young family, Richard takes a job scrubbing Cheeto dust off of factory floors. The prospects here don’t seem great—Latino employees like him are rarely allowed to trade their jumpsuits for white collars no matter how hard they work—but he’s determined to make himself into something great. Then, one day, this son of a Mexican immigrant comes up with the idea for Flamin’ Hot Cheetos by covering a bunch of Frito-Lay chips in Mexican seasoning.

Flamin’ Hot is at is most effective when it’s operating as a bubbly comedy, bouncing between Richard’s workplace antics and his own chip-making experiments. Garcia is a mischievous comic presence, with a sly smile and an acrobatic pair of eyebrows, while Longoria lends a few playful touches to the visual side of things: One cute scene shows the passage of time by having a series of crates with years printed on them whisked off a factory floor.

But the early attempts to anchor the story in weighty subject matters like racism and child abuse clash with the TV commercial-cheerfulness of the film. Beyond that, Flamin’ Hot puffs its story out with an exhausting series of inspirational speeches delivered by Richard, his now-reformed father, his steadfast wife (Annie Gonzalez), his workplace mentor (Dennis Haysbert), and basically any other character who’s willing to stand still long enough to get a monologue in. And those speeches are all riddled with clichés about “being a somebody, not a nobody” and other nuggets of wisdom that seem to have come straight off a production line.

Late in the film, Richard gives a rousing talk to his fellow factory workers, encouraging them to take up his cause and make Flamin’ Hot Cheetos a success—attesting that it’s workers like them, not slick-talking executives, who really make things happen. It’s a nice sentiment, but it’s hard to take seriously given that corporations like Frito-Lay don’t exactly go out of their way to ensure that workers like Richard are adequately rewarded for the value they create.

In the end, then, Flamin’ Hot plays out as an occasion for a major corporation to celebrate itself—to use the optics of worker solidarity to bolster its corporate success story in a way that’s not just dubious but more than a little nauseating. Longoria’s film is as artificial as its namesake, packed with flavor and easy to consume in a distracted sort of way. But when the bag is empty, you can be left wondering if it’s not all more than just a little bit bad for you.