REVIEW: Flamin’ Hot [2023]

Rating: PG-13 | Runtime: 99 minutes
Release Date: June 9th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Searchlight Pictures / Hulu
Director(s): Eva Longoria
Writer(s): Lewis Colick and Linda Yvette Chávez / Richard Montañez (book A Boy, A Burrito and a Cookie: From Janitor to Executive) / Richard Montañez and Judy Montañez (life)

It burns good!

I would generally say that you should read a book if you want the truth, but Eva Longoria’s Flamin’ Hot takes from one that’s apparently not entirely true either. Adapted by Lewis Colick and Linda Yvette Chávez from subject Richard Montañez’s autobiographies A Boy, a Burrito, and a Cookie and Flamin’ Hot: The Incredible True Story of One Man’s Rise from Janitor to Top Executive, the film tells the tale of a streetwise Mexican American who discovered the power of marketing at a young age while wielding reverse-psychology to make his bullies try the burritos they were so quick to call him names over (and subsequently purchase them). It didn’t stop him from falling into crime as a teen due to America being built in such a way that crime was his only outlet for survival (drugs can be marketed too), marriage and fatherhood soon brought him to Frito-Lay as a janitor at eighteen.

Jesse Garcia is of course not eighteen, so learning that age courtesy of an end credit fact saying the real Montañez retired in 2019 after forty-two years of service had me questioning my math skills since it meant the forty-year-old actor was playing twenty-six for the majority of the film’s 1990s setting. Let suspension of disbelief be your friend, though, because age doesn’t really matter here.

It’s not about Montañez being a wunderkind. It’s about him persevering against all odds to not only make himself a success, but to do it while wearing his Mexican heritage proudly on his chest. It doesn’t therefore matter that he was supposedly only a janitor for one year before graduating to a machinist in 1976. Dangling that carrot in front of his face for almost two decades on-screen becomes an incentive for the fictional Richard. That struggle causes him to “think like a CEO.”

It’s a motto that comes courtesy of actual CEO Roger Enrico (Tony Shaloub) when the economy tanked and the company hoped to inspire their ranks towards innovation. Montañez takes it to heart with help from his friends (Dennis Haysbert’s engineer and Bobby Soto’s drug dealer) and family (Annie Gonzalez as his wife Judy) to create a new flavor that could inspire his community’s untapped potential as a key American consumer demographic.

Longoria and company are therefore humanizing a very capitalist story—turning exploitation into ethnic pride. So, of course PepsiCo would embrace these origins even if they themselves issued a 2021 report refuting their factual basis. Pepsi looks like a great corporation here who listens to their workers on the lowest rung of the ladder because “it takes all kinds” even if we know in our hearts it was a total fluke at best. They wouldn’t lend their brand if the film wasn’t also an advertisement itself.

And that’s fine because the feel-good narrative works. Garcia and Gonzalez are funny, endearing, and dramatically complex those few instances when the script allows them to be emotional (mostly opposite the always great Emilio Rivera as Richard’s reformed, abusive father). Longoria has fun with her narrator by having Montañez speak over other actors as they mime his embellished “hood” affectation before rewinding to show how vanilla these executive exchanges actually look behind closed doors and she proves she has what it takes to tug at heartstrings and entertain at the cinema alike.

Because while it may not be particularly memorable or unique, Flamin’ Hot makes good on its promise to bring a lesser-known rags to riches tale of Latino exceptionalism to the masses in a self-deprecatingly comedic fashion. After all, whether Montañez truly invented the seasoning pales in comparison to the reality that his high school dropout did ultimately ascend to the executive suite.