McDonald’s doesn’t make straight up movie tie-in meals anymore. Of course Happy Meal boxes and toys can and often will be themed after newly-released children’s movies, but I’m talking about adult meals. In the old days you could get a Jurassic Park or Batman Returns collector’s cup along with the fry and burger boxes being printed with promotional art from the movie. Nowadays the Golden Arches seems more about “collabs” with musicians (the “BTS meal“) and self-referential appeals to millennial consumers’ nostalgia for the McD’s of their childhood (the “Adult Happy Meal“).

Not that they ever would have anyway given that The Apprentice is most certainly not Jurassic Park or Batman Returns, it still feels like a missed opportunity for McDonald’s and the filmmakers behind the new biopic examining convicted felon former President Trump’s early business career spanning from roughly 1973 to 1986. That they debuted on the same day would be enough alone. Throw in the fat bastard’s legendary love of Big Macs – a love that may even exceed his love of racism and corruption – and the fact that it’s a chicken version a day after he bitched out of another debate with Vice President Kamala Harris – the timing outright demands a combo review and a photoshopped image of what could have been if the marketing crew at McD’s had balls and a sense of humor.

MCDONALD’S NEW CHICKEN BIG MAC

The quality of McDonald’s food has noticeably, if only slightly more than marginally, improved over the last few years, something the chain committed to doing when Shake Shack and Five Guys were growing explosively and pulling away the part of the customer base that no longer wanted Grade F meat and oat fillers for their fast food burgers. Nowadays McD’s beef is probably like a Grade C-minus mixed in with fancier, soy-based fillers and the improvements are to the point where the chain’s (well-deserved) reputation for garbage food would put it more on par with, say, Applebee’s or Chili’s had McD’s food never sank to the nadir it had over the last several decades.

What still definitely does suck however is the McChicken, the cheapest poultry sandwich offering, which is probably like the trimmings left behind at a Tyson slaughterhouse cooked and compressed into a breaded patty. I had expressed some concern that the Chicken Big Mac would be the McChicken patties substituted for the all-“beef” patties but thankfully this is not the case. The patties were alright. Nothing special but certainly not bad either if you’re like me and indulge in fast food a few times a month. If you know what a Big Mac and what a higher end McDonald’s chicken sandwich taste like then you’re in for approximately zero surprises here… Except for the price.

Yes, complaining about the price of fast food in 2024 is boring. Yes, complaining about the price of anything in New York City is boring. Still it’s like, what the fuck? How do the chicken patties justify a freaking 43 percent markup? It might have been bigger than a regular Big Mac, but that’s just eyeballing it from memory. I really don’t know. I sure as shit wasn’t going to get both to do a comparison because I sure as shit did not want to eat both. It wasn’t worth the extra cost.

Nor was it worth waiting the 20 goddamned minutes it took for the McD’s on Flatbush Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn to finally hand me the bag. Holy shit the place was crowded at 6:30 PM on a weekday. I ordered from the app on the way and it was like I might as well have gone to a diner. Hell a diner probably would have been faster than this fucking “fast food” place’s kitchen.

So I do not recommend the McDonald’s Chicken Big Mac, but I’m not saying it was an absolute atrocity either. You can get one, you’ll probably find it tastes fine enough, and you’ll pay extra.

Whatever.

SPECIAL SECRET BONUS REVIEW: THE MUSIC AT THE MCDONALD’S IN DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN

As most readers know, the Spartan side of the pre-November 30, 2021 National Zero was mostly a copy-and-paste operation in which news, opinion, and analysis alike were clipped from other websites’ articles. There were a few self-composed gems in there as I started to gain my confidence as a writer to the point where I could compose the vast majority of “my” content here.

This is one of them, from November 25, 2020, a caption under a USA Today headline that said “Dead mink infected with a mutated form of COVID-19 rise from graves after mass culling”:

That was funny, right? Hahaha, Spartan and his comically exaggerated irrational hatred toward Billy Joel and “We Didn’t Start The Fire” in particular. Who would update the lyrics in a cover anyway?

FUUUUUUUUUUCK! FUUUUUUUUUUCK! FUUUUUUUUUU-UUUUCKKKKK! FUCKING “KURT COBAIN, POKEMON, NUCLEAR ACCIDENT FUKISHIMA JAPAN”?!?!? FUUUUUUUUCKK!!! WHO THE FUCK THOUGHT THAT WAS EVER NECESSARY?!? FUCKING SET YOURSELVES ON FIRE!!

Ahem… Remembering I had to write all my notes on the order cards at Alamo Drafthouse last time when I reviewed Civil War for this site (GIF above from it expresses my feelings about “We Didn’t Start The Fire 2023”) I picked up a legal pad from the Target in the building and got to my seat…

THE APPRENTICE

My handwriting isn’t that bad considering I was scrawling these notes in the dark while keeping both eyes on the screen. After memorializing the McDonald’s experience with some rage about the shitty Fallout Boy cover and the price of the Chicken Big Mac, there’s eight tally marks for the number of production companies credited in the open. Then “NYC/1973 (?) Cohn intros himself with telling Trump to sue govt over segregation fines,” “Collecting rent door-to-door in dogshit towers,” “Dad Fred played by Martin Donovan” then I noted he’s “abusive to Fred Jr… nice guy, drunk.”

Then about five more pages of notes… Anyway the top-level is “The Apprentice is about a young Donald Trump being mentored by psychopath lawyer Roy Cohn” but even that is a stretch to call that the “plot.” I keep thinking about Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Casino, and The Wolf of Wall Street but even those had more of what we understand as “plot” to them than The Apprentice.

That’s not to say it’s unwatchable. It was entertaining. It’s just that it’s hard to square being entertained with analyzing the film as a politics junkie. Civil War made that task easy by separating itself almost entirely from real-world context. A film about a real person, one so unfortunately central to our real-world political context is impossible. This isn’t Henry Hill or Jordan Belfort or Ace Rothstein (actual real name Frank Rosenthal), inspirations generally unknown to larger audiences.

It’s Donald Trump, and as such it’d be better to just do this by points rather than trying to weave together another few paragraphs of a review in article format:

🍊 Jeremy Strong’s going to win an Oscar for his role as Cohn. The guy’s a damn good actor.

🍊 Maria Balkova as Ivana Trump turned in a fine performance as well. Her previous claim to fame, pranking Rudy Giuliani into thinking he was about to have sex with an underage hooker in the most recent Borat movie is a pretty freaking funny and all-too fitting connection.

🍊 Martin Donovan’s usually a dick in his roles: Tom Buchanan in some TV remake of The Great Gatsby, the snitch in Insomnia, some prick Army colonel in that one really bleak WWII movie When Trumpets Fade. So he was a natural casting choice for Fred Trump, an unlikable asshole.

🍊 The man himself, played by Sebastian Stan, previously most known for his role as Bucky “The Winter Soldier” Barnes in the Marvel movies. Whether there was a lot of footage of Trump in the 1970s for Stan to study I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter though, and I’ll get to why.

🍊 If there was a movie about Hitler ages 25 to 35 or whatever and the first hour was him getting rejected from art school repeatedly while occasionally saying antisemitic things then you probably wouldn’t be all that moved by it. That’s pretty much the first hour of The Apprentice. Trump, who goes door-to-door collecting rent from Fred’s tenants, meets Cohn, who finds gay kompromat on the Justice Department attorney going after them for housing discrimination – the evidence being that rental applications for Blacks were literally marked with “C” – and gets the government to settle.

🍊 Young Donald has vision for revitalizing Midtown Manhattan, which in the 1970s was a complete shithole, starting with the Commodore Hotel on 42nd Street. How accurate this is to real life I don’t know, since the film is a blend of fact and fiction. Was Roger Stone really one of Cohn’s pool boys?

🍊 I was writing notes during a brief scene when Donald was sleeping on the couch while Richard Nixon announced he was resigning on TV and then was still sleeping when he gave his farewell address. Wish I had caught that, but Trump is agnostic politically more or less the entire film. Every future real-world President Trump line/ethos uttered comes from Strong as Cohn: “Last line of defense between a free world and a totalitarian hellscape,” “This is a nation of men, not laws,” etc.

🍊 The film flashes forward to the mid-1980s and Trump has definitely changed then. He’d been an impressionable punk but by the time he’s trying to get the Trump Tower built he’s on “diet pills” and evolving into the nihilistic tyrant we know and hate today. The lines from a scene with Mayor Ed Koch (who should’ve been played by the fake Ed Koch from the first Tim Burton Batman… although that guy’s most likely dead by now) sounds like it was copied from a Truth Social post. Whining “you’re being a very unfair guy” and deriding Koch for having “no talent and only moderate intelligence” simply because Koch wouldn’t give him a nine-figure tax abatement to build the tower.

🍊 The “erectile dysfunction” scene we were promised was not even as remotely as embarrassing as billed. It’s one moment in Atlantic City where he’s worried and distracted by creditors.

🍊 Nor was the “rape” scene particularly disturbing or violent. Donald does force himself on Ivana, but that it comes minutes after she interrupted him reading a magazine on the couch to give him a book about the “G-spot,” while wearing lingerie, just doesn’t hit that hard… This is NOT to minimize it, but let’s just say that if Ivana had never publicly accused Donald of marital rape then you might even just call it rough, angry sex you’ve seen in other R-rated movies.

🍊 Roger Stone tried to recruit Donald in the mid-80s. No idea whether or not it happened.

🍊 Cohn and Trump drift apart during this period, almost like Frank Lopez in Scarface telling Tony Montana he’s getting too big, too greedy to be sustainable. Of course Cohn was right, but he won’t admit it. Even when Donald’s sending Roy a bill for the hotel room he and his boyfriend have been staying in and Roy’s screaming at him there’s still like a little tiny hint of fatherly pride from Roy that Donald has truly turned into the evil, nihilistic son of a bitch he made him into.

🍊 A chorus singing at Roy’s funeral is the backdrop to a montage of Trump not there, but in an operating rooms getting liposuction and his scalp stapled to cover up a bald spot.

🍊 Didn’t fully appreciate Stan’s performance until the end (this isn’t a “spoiler” any more than me ruining the ending of Apollo 13 or Public Enemies) when Donald’s sitting with Tony Schwartz, the guy who actually wrote “The Art of The Deal,” when he was evolving into the Orange God Emperor. I was like “Holy shit, he’s REALLY got Trump down.” All the tics and mannerisms were there. Stan’s been rumored to play a middle aged Luke Skywalker in some unrealized new Star Wars project. His real future is playing Trump again in some movie about January 6th or the Russia probe or whatever.

🍊 “Your face look like an orange” – Ivana to Donald during a fight.

Again, Civil War was easy to describe and share my thoughts because it was (unexpectedly) divorced from the real world context. The Apprentice has too many threads tangled up in of our day-to-day over the last nine years that it’s hard to nail it down with any concision. The TLDR is it’s good, entertaining, but not nearly as dark and controversial as the whole throttled release situation might have implied. It is not a must-see in the theater immediately but it is very far from bad.

And I’ll just leave it off here instead of trying to slap together some grand through-line about renewal and rebuilding and changing and all that shit that links the Chicken Big Mac, New York City, Fallout Boy’s cover of “We Didn’t Start The Fire,” Trump, Roy Cohn, and The Apprentice.

That’s enough value for now.