Big Mac with extra mayo and double cheese, a strawberry sundae, an icy soda, and a heaping carton of fries — super sized. Yummy right? Not after watching Morgan Spurlock’s “Super Size Me,” the Michael Moore-esque documentary on fast food and obesity in America. This film delivers a hilariously smart yet disgustingly straightforward look into this “fast food nation” that takes pride in everything that comes in gargantuan proportions — especially food.
The documentary follows writer/director/producer Spurlock on his 30-day journey as an average American living on a strict regime of McDonald’s food coupled with minimal exercise. First, kudos to anyone who comes up with such originality: “fulfilling every eight-year-old’s dream” of eating McDonald’s for breakfast, as Spurlock puts it. Second, hats off to anyone who could actually shove down three very artery-clog-a-licious meals of pure Mickey-D’s food every day for a full month straight.
With his health monitored regularly by a cardiologist, internal medicine physician, gastroenterologist and dietician, Spurlock takes on his clever endeavor to boldly expose the causes of the second-largest growing disease in America — obesity. In this award-winning documentary, he takes it upon himself (literally) to show that the gross availability of fast food is the number one culprit for this epidemic of obesity, and he’s got the chub to confirm it. Who would’ve thought that good old Ronald McDonald would be the street peddler of addictive and toxic food-like substances — McNuggets, McFlurry, McHeroin — pushing Americans into a drug-like binge toward fat-dom?
Spurlock proves that fast food is, with no simpler terms available, very bad for you. More importantly, however, “Super Size Me” is able to point out a truth that not even the greatest of science books could teach America: This alarmingly great rise in binge-eating fast food is an addiction undetected by the layman’s eye.
Without much required for great filmic effects and action, the documentary shows a side of reality that no reality show could capture. And it is very satisfying. With the same gritty cinematography as MTV’s “Jackass,” “Super Size Me” makes the audience feel like they’re watching a homemade video of a live, walking science experiment.
Spurlock gathers enough data to make the film credible, while the humor keeps the film from being a mere documentary. The result? A side-splittingly funny film that makes the audience wheeze with laughter and cry in disgust at the gorges of Super-Sized America. Any one film that can completely turn off the audience to ever ordering a Quarter Pounder again deserves a super-sized round of applause.
