THE KITCHEN SINKS
Stellar cast is not enough to salvage painfully unfocused noir crime thriller
“Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains.” That’s Humphrey Bogart spitting out the hard-boiled dialogue of Raymond Chandler in 1946’s The Big Sleep. But he could just as easily be talking about The Kitchen, a noir crime thriller with so many aspirations it ends up rattling around drunkenly, uncertain where to begin.
So, where to begin? Let’s start with three amazing performers — Elisabeth Moss (starring in The Handmaid’s Tale and managing to pack in multiple movie projects on the side), Melissa Mccarthy (fresh off her Oscar nomination for Can You Ever Forgive Me?) and Tiffany Haddish (still riding the breakout wave of Girls Trip).
They play the wives of two-bit Irish gangsters in the late ’70s in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen. When
their husbands get three years for holding up a liquor store, they find themselves hard up for cash, and decide to try their hand at loansharking, protection racketeering and all the other scummy business ventures of their men.
It turns out they do a better job of it, too. But that success brings attention from others in the Kitchen, and from as far away as Brooklyn (Bill Camp does a great turn as rival mobster Alfonso Coretti).
The Kitchen is the directing debut of Andrea Berloff. She also adapted the source material, a comic book series from DC’S Vertigo imprint, which also inspired David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence and V For Vendetta. It’s competently shot, but weirdly unfocused in so many other ways.
Motivation is inconsistent, with Mccarthy looking nervous in almost every scene, while
Moss undergoes a lamb-to-lion transformation that never feels earned. Ditto another character’s doublecross. And Domhnall Gleeson, introduced as a cold-blooded killer and described as an army vet with issues, quickly becomes one of the more sympathetic characters, not that there’s much competition.
The soundtrack — a K-tel hits of the ’70s mix that includes Heart’s Barracuda, Kansas’s Carry On Wayward Son and a couple from Fleetwood Mac — neither underpins the action nor counterpoints it. And when the women hatch their big scheme, the score goes with a lilting folk guitar sound.
It’s like robbing a bank to the music of Classical Gas.
And my, my, my, such a lot of guns! I lost track of how many funerals punctuate the plot. In that opening scene, guns are drawn but never fired, but for the rest of the movie it feels like just the opposite — weapons are discharged almost before they are aimed. It’s a good way to shoot yourself in the foot. And while there are films that celebrate gun violence and others that condemn it, The Kitchen seems to espouse a middling moral vacuum. The guns just are. It’s mildly sickening.
The Kitchen is not a great movie, but it feels like it has greatness — or at least better-ness — lurking within. Perhaps another edit would help, though at 102 minutes it’s hardly bloated. I’d also recommend composer Bryce Dessner (The Revenant) take another pass at the score, that the soundtrack strive to move beyond the obvious, and that a few scenes be reshot to make the dialogue sound specific to the era, and not generic 21st-century-ese. But without this kind of costly renovation, this is a kitchen that just isn’t cooking.