Day 38: The Coca-Cola Kid (1985)

A few years ago I was bored surfing the web and decided to search Coca-Cola in IMDB. For those who know me, they know that I am not only addicted to Diet Coke, but also a big fan of the company itself. I was surprised to find this film among the rest - for it was the only fictional film among a series of documentaries. A quick check proved that it wasn't sponsored, endorsed or licensed by Coca-Cola either (a prologue to the film makes this point quite clear), which intrigued me even more. Apparently Coca-Cola found that the film didn't harm their image at all, so they allowed the film to be screened. I'm not sure what film Coca-Cola saw, but this film does anything but bolster their image.

Becker, a top Coca-Cola salesman, travels from Atlanta to Australia to find out if there is any holes in Coca-Cola's reach down under. He finds Anderson Valley, an area of Australia where not a single bottle of Coke has been sold. McDowell, a local eccentric, has been making home-brew soft drinks for years and corners the market in Anderson Valley. As Becker tries to convince McDowell to sell out to Coca-Cola, McDowell resists. The film quickly spirals into a tale of American Commercialism and Imperialism with Coca-Cola standing in as the metaphor for the "evil" corporations of the West ruining the Australian way of life. What starts off as a promising film quickly unravels and falls apart. With too many subplots - Becker's romantic interest with his secretary, his secretary's crazed and violent ex-husband, Becker's constant attempt to find "the Australian sound" for a jingle, and the waiter at the hotel, who for some reason, believes Becker to be a CIA agent.

The script is based on two works, The Americans, Baby and The Electrical Experience, both of which are short stories that involve the same principal characters but with no linear connection. The script appears to have the same issue - jumping from story to story with no real connection, resulting in a movie that ends up falling apart. What should be the main element of the film, the Becker and McDowell conflict, ends up getting lost and almost forgotten about among the rest of the muddled stories.

What is most disappointing is that the film has good ideas and potential, but fails to implement them properly. There is a few delightful scenes and a few chuckles, but nothing to sustain the film. That being said the film includes a Coca-Cola jingle that, in my opinion, rivals most of real ones ever created. The director's inability to control the film and keep it centered on the plot allows it to derail, resulting in a crash of a film.

One last point - the ending. This is a spoiler alert, but since I doubt anyone reading this will ever see it, I'm not overly concerned. The film ends with Becker realizing his role as just another cog in the machine that is Coca-Cola and leaves the company and settles down with his secretary. Charming enough ending. As the camera pans away from this happy couple to wards the horizon, a title card appears that says "Three weeks later World War Three started." Out of nowhere, in a film that has nothing to do with war, finishes by informing the audience that WW3 will soon begin. There is no correlation between the last 90 minutes of confusion that would lead anyone to even consider that the events would lead to WW3, and I am fairly confident that the events of the film do, indeed, have nothing to do with the war. In an attempt to make sense of the ending, this is my idea of what it means. Coca-Cola is used as a metaphor for American Imperialism and all the horrors that entails. While Becker was able to realize his lack of value within this large machine and escape it's grasp, the machine cannot be stopped, and American Imperialism will eventually lead to the next World War. A bit far fetched, and quite literally tacked on to the ending, it just adds one more confusion to this already confusing mess of a film.