The harried owner of a fast-food joint (Ann Dowd), preparing her staff for a big night’s business, gets rung by the police and told that Becky (Dreama Walker), the pretty young thing behind the counter, has stolen someone’s money.
The complainant has given them her exact description and now the police want her strip-searched for the money. Unfortunately they can’t get there themselves, so the owner has to do it, despite the innocent girl’s protestations.
Not long into the film you smell a rat, particularly because there are straplines before it starts telling us that people will do almost anything when ordered to by the authorities. And that, in America, it happens a lot.
Apparently this story is substantially true and based on an incident in a branch of McDonald’s in 2004. But in giving away the kernel of the film before it starts, writer/director Craig Zobel doesn’t give us the chance to be truly surprised.
Well as the film is performed, particularly by Dowd as the manager attempting to make order out of chaos, you can scarcely credit what happens.
Was no one, except for a young co-worker who refused to help with the strip-search, audacious enough to suggest ringing the local police for confirmation?
All you can say at the end, when the mystery caller, from many miles away and obviously obsessed with the girl, is eventually apprehended, is: “Only in America.”
