The Kitchen ** / *****
Directed by: Andrea
Berloff.
Written by: Andrea
Berloff based on the comic book series by Ollie Masters and Ming Doyle.
Starring: Melissa McCarthy (Kathy
Brennan), Tiffany Haddish (Ruby O'Carroll), Elisabeth Moss (Claire Walsh), Domhnall
Gleeson (Gabriel O'Malley), James Badge Dale (Kevin O'Carroll), Brian d'Arcy
James (Jimmy Brennan), Jeremy Bobb (Rob Walsh), Margo Martindale (Helen
O’Carroll), Bill Camp (Alfonso
Coretti), Common (Gary Silvers), E.J.
Bonilla (Gonzalo Martinez), Myk Watford (Little Jackie),Wayne Duvall (Larry), Pamela Dunlap (Mary), John Sharian
(Duffy), Brian Tarantina (Burns), Will Swenson (Michael Mariano), Annabella
Sciorra (Maria Coretti), Bernie McInerney (Paul Hogan), Sharon Washington
(Estelle), Matt Helm (Colin), Angus O’Brien (Mark Williams).
The
Kitchen is a movie that feels like the entire first season of a television show
crammed into 100 minutes. It could be a good TV show – the cast is excellent,
and some individual scenes work, but overall the movie lacks any real flow or
coherence. It feels like a lot of character development and plots points are
happening off-screen, between scenes, and so in every scene you have to
reorient yourself to whatever the new reality is based on how the actors are
playing it. The film is based on a little known DC comic, but it seems to want
to cram in an entire run into one film – instead of perhaps something that work
better, like being an introduction to the series – an origin story. It’s the
type of movie that gives you whiplash, because it jumps around so much without
much in the way of rhyme or reason.
The film
takes place in 1970s Hell’s Kitchen – and focuses on three wives of some fairly
low-level mobsters. When their husbands are sent to jail for three years, and
the “family” doesn’t give them much in the way of support Kathy Brennan
(Melissa McCarthy), Ruby O’Carroll (Tiffany Haddish) and Claire Walsh
(Elisabeth he Moss) decide they’re going to take over the protection racket in
Hell’s Kitchen. You would think this would be a complicated process, but no –
not really. They simply go door-to-door and tell the businesses that they’ll
play them now, and they say okay. While this does spark a war of sorts with the
current boss – Little Jackie – it doesn’t last very long (the way it ends is
truly one of the more bizarre, out-of-the-blue moments in any movie I can think
of). Soon, they have some muscle in the form of Gabriel (Domhnall Gleeson) – a
veteran with some mental issues – who falls in love with Claire. Claire goes
from meek domestic abuse victim to full blown psychopath is record time. And
Kathy and Ruby figure out that there are actually really good at running things
– and don’t plan to back down for anyone, not even each other.
There’s
more – a lot more – plot in The Kitchen, and dozens of minor characters that
the movie wants us to keep straight and care about, despite the fact that they
are barely introduced by the time some of them are murdered. There are rogue
cops and FBI agents, dozens of minor gangsters, Hasidic Jews, Italian mobsters
from Brooklyn, the three women’s husbands, and one of their mothers (Margo
Martindale), who apparently is very well respected by the “family”, although we
don’t know why. All of this robs the films of what could have made it so
interesting – Claire’s transformation into the psychopath she becomes, how
Ruby, a black woman, navigates the Irish dominated Hell’s Kitchen that
basically hates her, and how Kathy goes from full on school mom, into a
powerful, intelligent gangster. When you’re adapting anything for another medium
– especially one that has the freedom to tell its story over a longer period of
time, you have to boil it down to its essentials – figure out what the main
thrust of what you want to say is. The Kitchen plays as if it wanted
everything, all at once. And as a result, nothing really works.
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