Director: Craig Zobel
Year Released: 2012
Rating: 2.0
A manager of a fast-food restaurant (Ann Dowd) takes a phone call from someone who claims to be a police officer and insists one of the manager's teenage employees (Dreama Walker) is guilty of stealing from a customer, which leads to the teenager being stripped, interrogated and even forced to perform oral sex on the manager's fiancé - in case you didn't know, this all happened in real-life at a McDonald's in Mount Washington, Kentucky. Here's a case where the utter weirdness of the (actual) incident proves too absurd to fully work as a movie - though the sociological implications are gripping intellectually, seeing it re-enacted, however tactfully, amounts to watching a young woman degraded because of obedience to some abstract form of "authority." No matter how good the performers are (and Dowd as the lead sells it completely in a tricky role: she has to come across as credibly ignorant), there's no escaping the notion that what you're watching are stupid people behaving like stupid people, as ignoble emblems of unquestioning servitude (thank heaven there are some figures in this that refuse to comply with the fake officer's demands). As a teacher, I have a difficult time getting my students to sit the hell down; this young lady allows herself to be spanked - and voluntarily allow her vagina to be probed - because some guy on the phone told her to do just that. I hope Louise Ogborn (the actual victim) uses her multi-million dollar settlement to get a better education.
