In ‘Burnt’ the acting is crisp but the plot is overdone: 2.5 stars

If you needed proof that chefs are the new rock stars, look no further than the recent batch of movies about them:

“Chef,” starring Jon Favreau as a disgraced chef who turns to a food truck for redemption; “The Hundred-Foot Journey,” about an Indian-born chef’s drive to succeed in the French-dominated world of haute cuisine; and now “Burnt,” starring Bradley Cooper as a talented but fallen chef intent on reclaiming his lost Michelin ranking.

As in its recent predecessors, the culinary details in “Burnt” are spot on, and the acting is strong. But in this case, the plot is ultimately a bit bland and predictable.

Cooper stars as Adam Jones, a bad boy musician — wait, I mean chef. After finally finding sobriety shucking 1 million oysters in New Orleans, he winds up in London with plans to launch his own redemption.

Adam saunters into the grand Langham Hotel in a black leather motorcycle jacket and proceeds to savage the food on his plate. The maitre d’, soft-spoken Tony (Daniel Bruhl), a member of his former Paris rat pack, is not above kicking him out of the hotel.

With good reason, Tony is nervous about reuniting with his former friend and enduring crush, but Adam is determined to forge ahead and calls in a favor from a cartoonish version of a dining critic (Uma Thurman), a lesbian who once succumbed to Adam’s roguish charms.

Tony persuades the hotel’s owner — his dad — to hire Adam for another stab at glory, but this time with conditions: Adam must take a weekly drug test, administered by a therapist (Emma Thompson), another underused star in an underdeveloped part.

Adam sets to work assembling a hard-charging kitchen crew, including Helene (Sienna Miller) and her adorable daughter, Lilly, who steals one of the best scenes in the movie; Max (Riccardo Scamarcio), who is just getting out of jail after severing someone’s nose during an especially intense kitchen brawl; and Michel (Omar Sy), who outwardly forgives Adam but harbors resentment that later boils over at the worst possible moment.

For anyone who has read Anthony Bourdain’s groundbreaking “Kitchen Confidential,” this is the standard motley crew of kitchen pirates, apparently now available out of central casting. While they thrive on the margins of society, curiously they strive for institutional validation in the form of a third Michelin star.

Adam is not interested in a review that calls his restaurant “interesting.” “We should be dealing in culinary orgasms,” he says.

Such food porn can be a crutch that does little to advance a been-there-done-that plot. Yet the depiction of kitchen camaraderie and technical skills is authentic, if at times bordering on inside baseball.

One of the funniest lines makes a reference to sous vide, a method of low-temperature cooking in a water bath, spawned by French chefs and popularized by Ferran Adria of the now-shuttered El Bulli.

When Adam wisecracks about “warming food up in condoms,” I may have been the only one who laughed.

This story was originally published October 29, 2015 at 8:00 AM with the headline "In ‘Burnt’ the acting is crisp but the plot is overdone: 2.5 stars."