Flamin’ Hot Review

★★☆☆☆ Feel-good Latino biopic packs flavour, but lacks nutritional value.

Richard Montañez’s rise from lowly janitor to the inventor of one of the world’s most popular snacks sounds like a match made in heaven for Hollywood’s feel-good treat machine. Indeed Flamin’ Hot is the kind of rags-to-riches tale you can’t help but love, an irresistible movie that might be light on originality but is bursting with positivity and love for the Latino way of life.

The film — available to stream now on Hulu and Disney Plus — tells the remarkable story of Montañez (Jesse Garcia — Narcos: Mexico), a long-struggling janitor at the Frito-Lay Rancho Cucamonga plant, whose endless perseverance over decades saw him invent the spicy flavour variant that’s now a staple of snack shelves worldwide.

Directed by Eva Longoria (Desperate Housewives) in an assured feature-length debut, and driven by Garcia’s endlessly likeable charms, Flamin’ Hot is a lot of fun while you’re watching it. It’s competently-made fare, a movie you can’t help but get wrapped up in with its indomitable underdog spirit.

But there’s a massive problem at the heart of the movie. Richard Montañez’s story, at the least the story presented here, appears to be a total fabrication. The evidence against Frito-Lay’s charismatic former marketing director is pretty conclusive, reported in exhaustive detail by the Los Angeles Times in 2021. Learning this during routine post-watch research was disappointing, yet another example of the film industry’s insidious ability to distort historical truth for financial gain.

As such, this Flamin’ Hot experience is more akin to buying a big fat bag of spicy potato chips, only to realise on opening that most of the content was nothing but air. Worse still, the snacks are painfully underseasoned and maybe even a little stale. How disappointing.

Taken at face value, it’s a fun movie that’s a legitimate attempt to provide a positive, trope-breaking depiction of the Latino community. But based on overwhelming evidence, Flamin’ Hot feels more like one of those dubious-as-shit business inspiration posts that have almost completely ruined LinkedIn. Did it even happen? Probably not, but who cares when it’ll get a ton of likes and engagement, right?

Originally published at michaelkenny.uk