Directed by: Andrea Berloff
Starring: Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, Elisabeth Moss, James Badge Dale, Brian D'Arcy James, Domnhall Gleeson, Common, Jeremy Bobb, Bill Camp, Myk Watford
I don't know where The Kitchen went wrong, but wrong it went. It's not a comedy, but there are plenty of unintentional laughs. The Kitchen wants to be a hard-boiled crime drama about three 1970's Hell's Kitchen mob wives who strike out on their own as criminals when their husbands are sent to prison. I just couldn't buy it. Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, and Elisabeth Moss are not the first actors who spring to mind when thinking of who could play hardened crime bosses, and The Kitchen is proof.
Melissa McCarthy has done well branching into drama (last year's Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a great example), but she doesn't provide this role with enough gravitas to pull it off. Her Kathy is a mother of two whose husband and two cohorts are busted trying to rob a convenience store and sentenced to three years in prison. Kathy and the wives of the idiots who got themselves pinched, Claire (Moss) and Ruby (Haddish), are promised to be taken care of by the new boss Little Jackie (Watford), but their weekly cash payments are lower than expected, mostly because those who are expected to pay for protection aren't paying. Little Jackie tells the trio to go pound sand, so the women decide to take over the collections rackets themselves and slowly but surely muscle in on Little Jackie's territory. They do so by promising to actually provide protection for their "clients" and handle whatever problems they encounter. I'm reminded of the scene in Easy Money when a mother learns her future son-in-law is part of a gang: "Oh, they're a good boys' gang, they help people."
The money flows in, the ladies have trouble keeping up with counting it all, and Little Jackie grows irritated enough to attempt to rape Claire, who already has suffered beaucoup abuse by her lout husband, but this doesn't end well for Little Jackie. Claire is saved by the introduction of another character who is so in the right place at the right time that he could only be described as a deus ex machina writ large. Ruby has her own problems, including a mother-in-law who hates her because she's black, while Kathy has two kids to raise (although they conveniently disappear while Kathy is doing her crime thing until they are actually needed again).
The Kitchen is never convincing. We are expected to believe people can be shot in Claire's tiny apartment without any of her neighbors calling the police. Or that Claire becomes a learned student of cutting up and disposing of bodies. Or that the streets are so conspicuously empty that characters can shoot people on the street and then drag the body to the car so they can chuck it in the trunk without anyone noticing. Or that someone who shoots another person in broad daylight (this time with people actually on the street) would dump the murder weapon right next to the dead body.
Ruby, Kathy, and Claire are about as inconspicuous as a roach crawling across a white rug. So much so that they attract the attention of a Brooklyn crime boss (Camp) who instead of simply killing them for encroaching on his business, decides to enter into a financial agreement which is extremely beneficial to the ladies. Uh huh. If there is one scene in which the women declare "we're now in charge" in varying degrees of menace, there are ten. I've lamented in reviews of some of McCarthy's bad comedies that she should spread her wings instead of wasting her time on lame movies which appeal to the lowest common denominator. With The Kitchen, I suppose I get what I deserve.
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