‘Flamin’ Hot’ Is A New Kind Of Faith-Based Movie, One In Which The God Being Worshipped Is A CEO

The poster for Eva Longoria’s new streaming movie Flamin’ Hot is a tongue-in-cheek variation on Michelangelo’s painting “The Creation of Adam,” with a godlike hand reaching out to touch the reclining figure of the movie’s hero Richard Montañez (Jesse Garcia), resting on a bed of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, the popular snack food variant that Montañez creates in the movie. Only after watching the movie, the image seems less cheeky and more genuine; Flamin’ Hot is essentially a faith-based movie, albeit one where God must co-manage alongside the co-deities of CEO worship and hustle-and-grind culture. This makes it all the funnier (and more than a little galling) that it’s also based on a bald fabrication.

Flamin’ Hot has been described as belonging to a different dramatic subgenre: the suddenly emergent behind-the-scenes corporate-product biopic, alongside recent entries like Air (which traces the creation of Nike’s Air Jordan sneaker through Nike’s attempt to score Michael Jordan’s endorsement deal), Blackberry (featuring the rise and fall of the once-dominant smartphone), and Tetris (the story of how the video game Tetris was retrieved from behind the Iron Curtain in the late 1980s). In that context, Flamin’ Hot is simply the latest and, as it happens, worst of these movies, explaining the origins of the spicy Cheeto flavor through the travails of Frito-Lay janitor Montañez.

But there’s a religious element through Flamin’ Hot that makes it a weirder and ultimately more suspect experience. Like a lot of faith-based dramas, its hero starts out as not especially pious, even described as criminal, while also being immediately sanitized for maximum likability. Richard and his wife Judy (Annie Gonzalez) face discrimination and familial abuse in 1960s SoCal, and, with the deck stacked against them, turn to selling drugs as young adults. But when Judy gets pregnant, they resolve to turn everything around and provide a respectable life for their family – and Judy in particular embraces a newfound faith, treated with the same vagueness as in countless evangelical pictures. That faith also reaches Richard’s father Vacho (Emilio Rivera) who, in a similarly evangelical-movie tradition, is an abusive man whose religious conversion clears him of those tendencies conveniently off-screen, leaving Richard on a tearful journey toward forgiveness of a father figure who doesn’t actually have to do much to earn his son’s eventual acceptance. 

This material is not always front and center of Flamin’ Hot, which spends more time on Richard’s work ethic and his conviction that the Latino market is being underserved by his employer, with lots of faithful side prayers from Judy. Where the movie truly keeps its faith is through craft, or lack thereof. Richard’s narration track has the ingratiating, faux-irreverent tone of a sweaty youth pastor, full of phony conversational asides and stale wisecracks, and though Longoria keeps things moving, she does a pretty terrible job with her actors, sticking Garcia and Gonzalez with one-note reactions out of a bad soap opera. The movie is too busy condescendingly stacking the deck for its scrappy heroes to give them any convincing sense of life lived outside of the frame.

What Flamin’ Hot ultimately has most in common with its more explicitly religious cousins is the goal of glorification, with Richard’s real-life inspirational autobiography serving as its holy text in place of Bible verses. In this way, Longoria’s film combines some themes and style from faith-based propaganda (albeit with a breezier-than-usual tone) with equally insidious CEO propaganda for a kind of prosperity-gospel passion play. Roger Enrico (Tony Shalhoub), the CEO of Frito-Lay, is depicted as a benevolent, fair-minded man, immediately keen to hear Richard’s idea for a new product; it’s very much in the tradition of movies like The Pursuit of Happyness, which clear the path for uncomplicated wealth uplift by making upper-level corporate figures into helping hands for anyone tenacious enough to reach them. (Any ire over the corporate structure is offloaded to generic middle managers with, naturally, no vision.)

That tenacity is supposed to be key: Richard also proves himself worthy by his endless willingness to toil, and though the movie is superficially sympathetic to the plight of the working man, it never suggests that anyone at the top has done anything less than work just as hard as Richard and his colleagues. Of course it doesn’t; the idea of capitalist-driven inequality would be heretical. Though Longoria at least allows for the existence of racism in creating Richard’s plight to begin with, it’s nothing a little bootstrapping can’t fix!

These paeans to hustle prop up a story that, frankly, doesn’t have much fresh dramatic tension – which would be par for the biopic course if not for a tiny, nagging detail that Richard Montañez did not invent Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. Montañez did have a spectacular rise through the ranks at Frito-Lay — he started as a plant worker and became a marketing exec, with a strong track record of success with similar products — but the Flamin’ Hot flavor line was actually developed earlier; the CEO who the movie lionizes as being so receptive to Montañez’s idea didn’t even start at Frito-Lay until after the product had begun its initial, regional rollout. 

This is not news; the story was reported in 2021, two years before Flamin’ Hot was released. But it’s striking to see the movie use its chummy tone, with narration that repeatedly scoffs at the “fancy degrees” that Montañez lacks compared to other Frito-Lay higher-ups, as cover for such a direct falsehood. The movie goes out if its way to denigrate the company’s usual flavor developers as, essentially, dorks in a lab who lack the real-world experience of Montañez, even though “his” product was, by all indications, developed through a pretty traditional team effort (filled with people with, yuck, “fancy degrees”).

Even this would not be unheard-of in the realm of biographies filtered through Hollywood screenwriting. But the zeal with which Flamin’ Hot perpetuates these misleading ideas, and its refusal to engage with the idea of Richard Montañez as any kind of embellisher or showman, gives the movie the unsettling demeanor of a true believer. Whether consciously or not, Longoria is genuflecting before a higher power: the additional money that can be made by taking the inspirational, prayer-friendly Richard Montañez story at face value. Flamin’ Hot has the trappings of a tedious faith-based drama, but it ultimately treats God as just another middle manager between CEO and Chosen One.

Jesse Hassenger is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com and tweets dumb jokes at @rockmarooned