Possibly Satirical Movie Review of Gerard Butler in "Cracker Barrel Has Fallen"

Cracker Barrel Has Fallen's spectacular special effects can't save it

A mini-review by Ruminato film critic Wesley Williams Jennings Bryan Hutchinson XIV

If you can imagine your favorite family dining chains under siege by a far-right nationalist group that has seized control of the American government, you might find the preposterous plot of Gerard Butler’s new entry into the “Fallen” franchise worth sitting through.

The film’s absurd plot revolves around a group of far-right nationalists who have seized the government. The coup is led by the Russian mob and a child sex trafficking ring that decides the best way to hide the truth of the vast scope of their deviant billion-dollar enterprise from the public is by attacking family diners.

The mayhem begins when the nationalists try to shut down a Tennessee family diner chain named Cracker Barrel.

The film opens with a quiet scene of a baldish woman eating alone at a Cracker Barrel restaurant as an AI-generated Sinead O’Connor sings, “I can eat my food in a family restaurant…” in the background.

Then, all hell breaks loose as men in masks break in and claim they are federal agents.

As the AI-generated Sinead belts out, “Nothing Compares to You,” the bald woman is wrestled to the ground by ten agents screaming anti-LBGTQ+ epithets.

This sets the scene rather well because we don’t yet know how preposterous the plot will become. As the raid continues, in walks ex-Secret Service agent Mike Banning, who drops a few expletives before shooting all ten agents in the head and saving the bald woman.

The pair hides out in a small apartment for a day while watching right-wingers on CNN say things like: “Cracker Barrel is done. Woke executives killed it, wrapped the corpse in a rainbow flag, and then made it do a little puppet show in New York City for the entertainment of all their woke little friends,”¹ and “We must break the Barrel.”²

Gerard Butler is his usual entertaining, he-man self, but he can’t save this plot, which culminates in a special effects extravaganza involving a lot of melted cheese dumped from a helicopter onto the White House by a sweating, filthy-faced Manning, whose final heroics should leave us cheering but instead only leave us sighing deeply and wishing we could get back that two and a half hours we just wasted.

Note: You may want to fast forward to the credits for a cameo appearance by Tom Cruise dangling from a ladder extending out of another helicopter as he carries an unidentified blonde woman to safety from the melted cheese that covers the Rose Garden.

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Thanks for reading!

Notes

“Cracker Barrell Has Fallen” is a real life quote, per the Bulwark article cited in the footnotes:

“We take no pleasure in reporting that Cracker Barrel has fallen,” the organization Texas Family Project wrote at the time. “A once family friendly establishment has caved to the mob.”

Image of Gerard Butler and Brett Ratner by Bob Bekian in image promo licensed as CC BY-SA 2.0; "Ooltewah Cracker Barrel sign" by Taz_911 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0; Photo of Gerard Butler in titling image by Gordon Correll, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; IMDB style mock-up created by author.

Footnotes

1. This is a real quote by the Federalist’s Sean Davis:

Egger, Andrew, and Jim Swift. 2025. “MAGA’s Cracker-Barrel Meltdown.” Thebulwark.com. The Bulwark. August 22, 2025. https://www.thebulwark.com/p/magas-cracker-barrel-meltdown-rebrand-branding-logo.

2. Another real quote. ibid