A wild error in judgment led director Richard Linklater to let Eric Schlosser turn his fabulous nonfiction work into a preachy drama about the horrors of cow-eating. A group of loosely related stories featuring a stellar cast (Greg Kinnear, Kris Kristofferson, Bruce Willis and, strangely, Avril Lavigne) orbits around a meat-packing plant in Colorado that uses illegal laborers to put poop into cow-related food products. While Schlossers book was a moving and effective exploration of the horrors of combining pure profit motive with food preparation, the film is a preachy, inhuman mixture of editorial content and cardboard characters. Its too bad, because a documentary from the same book could have made a real impact.