Metacritic reviews

A mildly entertaining but well acted, sumptuously photographed and smartly written comedy with dark undertones about culinary addiction that can only be called “delicious.” See it and then check your cholesterol.

Just when you think you know where Burnt is headed, there’s an underhanded twist about halfway in. And it’s almost enough to set the movie right.

Every thoughtful story beat and every well-observed character moment happens with such predictability and slick professionalism that the whole project seems smothered in bland sweetness.

Cooper can do this kind of arrogant-but-irresistible golden boy shtick in his sleep, but that doesn't make it any less pleasurable to watch. Flashing his baby blues and a fiery temper, the actor gives a fully engaged performance that almost makes us want to forgive the movie’s laziness. Almost.

The film’s haphazard construction is made all the more frustrating because somewhere in this material is a much more resonant picture.

Burnt isn’t a bad movie, but the melodrama is overwrought and overdone, the romance warmed over and the “Cocktail” formula shaken, stirred and utterly played.

Burnt deals less with the food itself than the way it drives Adam to the brink of insanity. Yet it falls short of generating any real urgency surrounding that situation.

Although John Wells’ dramedy is energized by its mouth-watering montages and an unsurprisingly fierce lead turn from Cooper, Steven Knight’s script pours on the acid but holds the depth, forcing its fine actors (including Sienna Miller and Daniel Bruhl) to function less as an ensemble than as a motley sort of intervention group.

Burnt ultimately feels like those sous-vide bags that Adam finds so worthy of mockery: trapped in plastic, with the air sucked out of it.

Everything in the by-the-numbers script signals that Adam must transform himself from and abusive tyrant in the kitchen to the head of a loving and fully functional family.