You gotta give big ups to director Richard Linklater for having the guts to attempt a film based on Eric Schlosser’s best-selling expose of the fast-food industry and its half-century impact on American Culture. (“Fast Food Nation” is one of my favorite non-fiction books and is one I highly recommend you read.)

Linklater could have chosen the easy route and made a documentary — guaranteeing him an Oscar nomination, if not an outright win. But no. Instead, he (along with Schlosser) develops a fictional narrative based on the facts of the book in an attempt to give a human face to all those statistics. The characters in the film are iconic, representing the various facets of the industry and how it impacts the country.

It’s a tall order, and Linklater almost succeeds. Almost.

The film, which intertwines several story lines, stars Greg Kinnear as Don Anderson, a top executive with Mickey’s, a fast-food chain. Don is the creator of The Big One, the most successful burger in hamburger history. He is sent to the meat-processing plant in Cody, Colo., to investigate reports of rampant E. coli infestations in the company’s meat patties. Apparently Mickey’s has been selling burgers containing high levels of fecal matter.

The film stars Greg Kinnear as Don Anderson, a top executive with McDonald’s.

Meanwhile, a young married couple (Wilmer Valderrama, Catalina Sandino Moreno) illegally cross the Mexican/American border and are whisked off by gypsy taxi to Cody to find work at the meat-processing plant, where they find the working conditions unsafe and oppressive. The women are sexually harassed by their supervisor (another Mexican), while the men work at the potentially lethal job of cleaning the slaughterhouse’s machinery.

Also in Cody is a highschool

student named Amber (Ashley Johnson), who works at the local Mickey’s. She falls in with a group of college eco-activists who want to lock horns with the corporate culture to somehow “rescue” the cattle.

Where “Fast Food Nation” succeeds is in humanizing the issue of the impact of corporate culture on the country. Where the film fails is that none of the storylines presented in the movie is resolved. The move just ... ends.

Maybe that was Linklater’s intent: To make a movie as unsatisfying as a fast-food meal. If so, then he succeeded.

But personally, I wish he’d made a documentary instead.

Grade: C+ (c) 2006 King Features Synd., Inc.