Name: Fat Man's Warning
Genre: Documentary
Released: 2007-04-29
Duration: 50 min
Rating: 6.7
Cast: Steve Daly, Jill Halfpenny

A terrible film that wastes all the potential in the concept

With obesity rates rising in the UK, we are now supposedly four years behind the US in regards how "fat" we as a nation are. To help challenge the UK and stop us going down the same road as the US, comedian Steve Daly (who is morbidly obese) flies over from Las Vegas to travel round the UK and deliver his warning not to be like him. Visiting schools, walking the streets, hanging around outside fast food outlets and getting medically checked out, Steve tries to make the point about eating healthy.

We do so love to mock our American cousins for being fat and poking fun at them. However as of April 2007 the BBC news states that in the last 25 years the UK adult obesity rates have almost quadrupled and about 75% of British adults are overweight (as defined within the BMI system). So for this reason this film interested me enough to have a look and see the case being built for healthy eating. However the film is a real failure and it was such a shame because the potential was there. The idea of using Steve as an example was a good one but by making him more or less the entire film, you do have to wonder what point of it was. With Super Size Me, the gimmick was nicely balanced with wider educational points and so on, with this one there isn't that.

Instead what we get is Daly saying "don't become like me" and getting tested to prove that he is in a bad state. The film has lots of members of the public and children saying "yeah, we need to learn his lesson" but really the problem is that few people can look at him and see the connection to their life or their diet  it is far too easy to see him as an extreme that will never happen to us. The film gets a bit better when it goes to Boston (Britain's fattest town) because the people are a bit closer to Steve than the majority of the public. However even here few seem to get it  my particular favourite being the biff in the brown tee-shirt. When Daly asks her why people say Boston is the fattest place in the UK, she stands there with her 20 chins and says "I really don't know why, I think it's bullsh1t" before rambling on about being "big and happy" rather than skinny and miserable. Becky and the James family is yet another example of this as they come over by being victimised by being called obese and seem to not be fussed at all.

So what did it achieve then, this gimmick? Well, not a huge amount. The narrator keeps repeating herself over and over about his dire warning etc and everyone keeps staring but the film totally fails to connect the 16 year old eating chips everyday with the physical condition of Daly. What is worse is that the point is makes is very weak  witness a kid eating burgers saying "why can't the government just shut MacDonalds down", only to be told how smart he is by Daly! He probably reached a few hundred people by doing this and it was down to the makers of the film to use him much better than this and to build a better film around him  one that would really hit home. As it was though, the film never aspires to more than putting him on speaker's corner and marking "success" by having Daly saying that he saw some mothers looking at their children as if they had got it.

A tragic shame then that Daly's efforts are squandered totally by a film that had nothing to offer beyond pushing him around the UK. It is perhaps lazy writing on my behalf, but this is just a big fat failure and a terrible way to handle an important subject.

The documentary is a form of non-fiction storytelling that aims to present factual information, insights, and perspectives on real-world subjects, events, issues, or people. Documentaries can cover a wide range of topics, including history, science, culture, social issues, nature, biographies, and more.

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Fat Man's Warning

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