Get these women out of overdone ‘Kitchen’ ‘The Kitchen’ Andrea Berloff. Melissa McCarthy, Elisabeth Moss, Tiffany Haddish. R for violence, language throughout and some sexual content. Great Good Fair Bomb Bad
If good intentions were gold, “The Kitchen” would be up to its fedora in Oscars come February. With women assuming positions of power in front of and behind the camera, “The Kitchen” pits a trio of aggrieved wives with an usagainst-the-world mentality against mob machismo to deliver a swift quick to the groin.
Unimpeachably awesome in theory. In practice, it could use some finessing.
Based on the DC Vertigo comic series of the same name, “The Kitchen” is set in the gritty, crime-ridden, trashstrewn, graffiti-marred New York City of the 1970s — the New York of “Serpico,” “Death Wish” and “Mean Streets,” where the streets are indeed mean enough to necessitate protection. In Hell’s Kitchen, that protection comes from the Irish mob, kept flush by businesses in need of their guns and muscle.
It’s a profitable world, and a hard one for women. Three mob wives — Kathy (Melissa McCarthy), Claire (Elisabeth Moss) and Ruby (Tiffany Haddish) — are all struggling in their own ways to find agency in their marriages. Kathy is kept in the dark to care for the kids, Claire is the victim of brutal domestic abuse and Ruby, the only black woman in the mob, is subjected to racism and infidelity.
And then, their husbands get busted and sent to Rikers for three years. Instead of crying about it, the disaffected mob wives get busy. There’s an empire to run, and anything boys can do, girls can do better.
“The Kitchen” is director Andrea Berloff ’s first time behind the camera as a feature film director (she earned an Oscar nomination for her screenwriting work on “Straight Outta Compton”). Though her film is stylish with period details, costumes and set dressing, it’s stylistically inert, the shallow plot moved along by montages set to selfsatisfied needle drops: Heart’s “Barracuda,” Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” and “Gold Dust Woman,” and an Etta James cover of “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” because “The Kitchen” is about as subtle as a shot to the kneecap. It’s as if Berloff started with the soundtrack and worked her way backwards to fill in the gaps.
The script is no more refined, making the films feminist intentions aggravatingly explicit. Every line uttered is a thesis statement on gender and racial power imbalances: “Pretty doesn’t matter, it’s just a tool women can use.” “The only thing black people need is power.” “I never felt safe. No woman does.”
That kind of on-the-nose writing makes the characters play more like concepts rather than thinking, feeling human beings to root for. These women are, after all, mob bosses, killing their enemies and dismembering their bodies in bathtubs. It takes more than gold rings, leather dusters and punchy oneliners to align the audience to their cause. “The Kitchen” requires Scorsese levels of charisma to work, and only McCarthy comes close out of sheer professionalism.
“What if the mob, but girls?” is a promising starting point that “The Kitchen” never satisfactorily moves beyond. at bvanden Twitter.com/