Flamin’ Hot review — Eva Longoria directs a spicy rags to riches tale

Ben Affleck recently gave us Air, a fond vision of Nike company history funded by Amazon. Nintendo starred in Tetris, released by Apple. No joke: Jerry Seinfeld and Netflix are soon to launch Unfrosted, about Kellogg’s creation of the Pop-Tart. But next off the production line of unlikely corporate hookups is Flamin’ Hot: an entire film about said flavour of Cheetos corn snack, crown jewel of PepsiCo subsidiary Frito-Lay, now platformed by Disney. What else might this odd Warholian sub-genre have in store? Pick a stock, and see you at the Oscars.

But the movies remain the preserve of the little guy, or at least his careful likeness. Enter Richard Montañez (Jesse Garcia), a Mexican-American man who started working as a janitor at Frito-Lay in the 1970s. Because Montañez, so the story goes, invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos while cleaning a company plant in Rancho Cucamonga, California, creating a cultural landmark and a billion-dollar brand.

The film can seem precisely what you might expect: a non-negotiable upbeat ode to family, enterprise and empty calories. The director is Eva Longoria, the actor best known for starring in TV’s Desperate Housewives. But stow whatever cynicism you bring. Like product design in the Darwinian snack market, there is real sophistication in a film this successfully broad, marrying competing flavours and even sprinkling on playful subversion.

With the movie staged as a salute to authenticity, harsh truths soon dent the cute foreshadowing of childhood (mom’s burritos hawked at school). The teenage Montañez is dogged by racism and poverty. But Longoria has an engineer’s sense of how much reality the story can take. The smile is never quite wiped from Garcia’s face, the mood further sunnied with zippy daydream sequences. And yet when the sugar might cloy, she throws in something unusually stark. “There’s a reason poor people always talk about God,” Montañez says bluntly. Religion is an unregulated market.

Cut to the factory floor of Frito-Lay. Because here, having secured a mop and bucket, Montañez starts his journey to something bigger than a pay cheque. Not that Longoria undersells a pay cheque. In hard times, more sacred cows are sacrificed. “Ain’t nothing trickling down” from the Reagan presidency; the C-suite is clogged with Ivy League deadbeats. Praise be to Montañez and his tangy eureka of pre-spicing Cheetos as Latino customers were already doing for themselves. All hail too the wise king that is PepsiCo chief executive Roger Enrico (Tony Shalhoub).

The current vogue for brand origin stories can seem impossibly weird. But for the streaming arms of Apple, Amazon and Disney, a clear logic lies in celebrations of plucky disrupters. And Flamin’ Hot has more between its ears than a genial nothing like Air. For all the cartoonish packaging, the stuff of the movie has substance: the mainstreaming of the Latino market; the uneasy question of whether corporate inclusion is an end in itself, or simply a means to drive profits. “People look for themselves on our shelves,” Montañez beams like James Stewart at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life. Capitalism can still work, the movie says. Here’s how.

The only snag is, it might not be true. With the film already greenlit, a 2021 Los Angeles Times exposé alleged Montañez never really invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos at all. He did, however, indisputably rise from janitor to Frito-Lay executive. (“This part was finally real,” Garcia says in voiceover, outside an office with his name on the door.) All concerned have since been terse, but the possible sting-in-the-tail only makes a fascinating film still more so. In business as in life, history is written by the marketing department.

★★★★☆

On Disney Plus from June 9