A film telling the story of a Mexican American janitor who went on to create a $1bn snack brand fits into Hollywood’s current cultural and creative moment rather perfectly. It’s been a time both of exploring the dramatic origins of everyday products and services (from Nike’s Air Jordans to BlackBerry to Tetris to Uber) and of finding more ways to tell diverse stories outside of a prohibitively limited lens, a lens that’s been particularly limited for Latino characters.
Despite Latino audiences over-indexing at cinemas in the US (in 2021, they had the highest per-capita attendance, averaging 1.7 visits a year compared with 1.3 for white audiences), there remains a disappointing dearth of big-screen representation (a report last year showed that just 5.2% of leads in film were Latino or Hispanic). Ahead of this summer’s landmark DC adventure Blue Beetle, centering a rare Latino superhero, Eva Longoria has found an unlikely success story to propel her to the title of film-maker, having cut her teeth on television. Her small-screen tutelage is hard to shake in this earnest and at times efficiently entertaining, yet also rather plodding rags-to-riches tale that aside from the odd flourish, feels very much like a TV movie.
It’s hard not to get at least mildly involved though in the story of Richard Montañez, as he grows up as a kid balancing his Mexican-American identity in 60s California while being targeted at school and physically abused at home. Longoria, and the screenwriters Linda Yvette Chávez and Lewis Colick, keep things light even as Montañez (now played by Jesse Garcia) falls into a life of crime with his partner Judy (Annie Gonzalez) by his side. The arrival of a baby forces them to reconsider but an unwelcoming job market, one especially unwelcoming for someone who looks like Richard, makes life a constant struggle. When he gets a job as a janitor at the local Frito-Lay factory, he takes the opportunity with all the enthusiasm he can muster, smiling through various indignities and grateful to be providing for his family.
Mopping floors and cleaning equipment isn’t quite enough, though, and when business starts to crumble with a recession-impacted market and a string of layoffs, Richard comes up with an idea, a way to cater to the underserved Latino market, to make the Cheeto … Flamin’ Hot.
There’s some obvious mirroring here, the adaptation of a story of someone striving to appeal to a growing yet underappreciated demographic attempting to do the exact same thing, and while the recent trend of business origin stories has been hit and miss to say the least, it’s at least refreshing to see someone who isn’t a straight white man progress within industry (2020’s Madam CJ Walker series Self Made felt similarly vital, if ultimately superior). The film neatly recognises the importance of food as cultural identity and the authenticity that should come with parlaying this into a just business proposition – but while there’s an easy underdog tale here to cheer on, it’s not quite as compelling as the makers seem to believe. Similar to Ben Affleck’s Air (a film that would have worked far better had Viola Davis’s force-of-nature mother been the lead), it all feels a little too minor, a Wikipedia page writ medium.
Because even the most magnetic moments (a montage of Montañez and family crafting the perfect chilli sauce, a late-stage grassroots marketing campaign) become dubious with even the lightest bit of research. These films, when done even half-correct, compel one to dig further into the facts, to learn more about the reality of the situation and it doesn’t take long to discover that Flamin’ Hot became the centre of controversy as soon as it was announced. The Los Angeles Times ran an investigation that found that Montañez’s involvement with the creation of the Flamin’ Hot Cheeto has not just been overstated but has been fully fabricated. Since then, a he said, they said back-and-forth has left the situation even foggier (the script was slightly tweaked to recognise the work of a separate team working on a similar project with one of the writers saying “enough” was true for it to work and it shouldn’t be seen as a documentary) and so the facts remain a mystery.
One accepts a certain amount of creative license with “true stories” and Montañez’s rise from the bottom to the top is undeniable regardless of his level of involvement with the snack in question, but taken as fact or fiction, the film just isn’t enough of a meal. It’s cheerily done and competently made but broadly sentimental to a fault, the strings being pulled too visible for the film’s many coerced moments of emotion to really work. For a film all about the importance of heat, it’s frankly lukewarm.
Flamin’ Hot is now available on Hulu in the US and Disney+ elsewhere
