I'm gonna go with John Leguizamo's character for the sake of Chef's reasoning. Like he said, he was given a bad script but made the best of it. Don't shoot the messenger. Go after the director instead.
shareThat was the point at which it becomes clear that the chef isn't scheming a grand revenge plot, but has instead gone utterly insane. He's not Hans Gruber, he's Jim Jones.
shareno one deserved to die.. except the Chef.
he was a little weenie who should've taken his own miserable life like a man
His mother assuming that's even who she was.
The food critic's editor didn't seem so bad...
His mother assuming that's even who she was.
So you're assuming that because Julian was such a psychopath, his mother must be to blame? If his soliloque is to be believed, it sounds like his mother was very much a victim of alcoholism. Her husband (Julian's father) was a drunk who abused her. She too formed a dependence on alcohol - which is all too common a pattern in situations like that. Did she deserve to die because she made tacos for dinner on Tuesday without exception. If that's the case, we're all headed to the gallows, aren't we?
shareJeremy, the sous chef
shareBut like the rest of Chef's staff, he was complicit in the plan to kill everyone that night (including himself).
shareAll of the guests were complicit by the end too. They were saying "thank you" and "we love you chef" along with the staff when Slowik explained that everyone would burn. Jeremy was clearly struggling and troubled before he killed himself. He was the only staff member who showed any doubt.
shareMaybe they thought that would appeal to his ego and spare their lives. When Margo/Erin appealed to his ego by encouraging him to cook a dish she knew he'd be able to master and complimenting him on it, she was set free. Just my two cents.
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More than “master” cheeseburgers, she knew he’d be HAPPY cooking a cheeseburger based on the photo of him at the burger joint.
He’d always wanted to set her free, not out of kindness but because she wasn’t part of his master plan. He just needed a satisfactory “excuse” to do so.
She gave him that excuse by challenging him to fulfill his true purpose, i.e., cooking food that would satisfy his customer, and by demanding a dish she knew would make him happy, she showed true appreciation for the chef himself.
That’s my take on it anyway. It wasn’t an appeal to his ego so much as an appreciation of him as a fellow “shit shoveler”
They just sat there and let some nutjob turn them into human smores without putting up a fight, so they all deserved to die.
shareI don't think I will ever agree that putting up no fight justifies someone's murder, no less via immolation. What I took from that scene was the notion of 'learned helplessness.' Perhaps they stood the best chance of overcoming Chef and his brainwashed staff at that point, but you have to bear in mind all of their thwarted efforts to escape up to that point. Humans (and animals) suffer from learned helplessness when their repeated attempts to solve a problem are defeated to the extent that when a workable solution presents itself they feel all too powerless to seize it. One of the patrons repeatedly threw and slammed a chair against the plate glass window; he didn't even scratch the glass. All of the males were given a chance to escape (with a 45 second head-start); each one of them was apprehended by the staff and returned to the restaurant. Reasoning/negotiating with Chef's equally deranged female assistant proved fruitless. When Margot/Erin radio'ed for help from the mainland, the dude from the Coast Guard proved to be a staffmember of the restaurant. I'm sure there are even more examples, but they all add up to the sense of learned helplessness the survivors up to that point must have felt by the time of the dessert course.
shareThe Black Kid: killing blacks is utterly racist.
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