‘KITCHEN’ SINKS
Irish mob drama can’t stand alongside other gangster classics
There are bad movies that are so very bad they’re lots of fun.
And then there’s “The Kitchen.” As in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, back in 1978.
All too predictable and yet perpetually unconvincing, “The Kitchen” posits that when three Irish Mafia mobsters are sent to Sing Sing, their unhappy wives — gamely played by Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish and Elisabeth Moss — decide to step up and step into their shoes.
McCarthy’s Kathy is the
first to seize the possibility that if “collections” aren’t being covered, she and her fellow prison widows will do it.
Claire calls their extortion business a “community service” and “Kitchen” would like us to believe this is all just a wonderful step up for women in a man’s world.
As written by Andrea Berloff (“Straight Outta Compton,” the genuinely awful Jamie Foxx thriller “Sleepless”), in her directing debut, “Kitchen” doesn’t bother to convey exactly how these women take over the mob.
Yes, there are breezy montages set to a funky upbeat soundtrack to show their swift rise but it’s evidence that this is indeed an adaptation of Boston native Ming Doyle and Ollie Masters’ comic book series where the particulars can be easily glossed over.
Yet there’s nothing cartoon-like
about Haddish’s Ruby O’Carroll, a Harlem native who jumped major hurdles to land downtown. Haddish is grimly convincing as a woman who married into a mob that notoriously hated African Americans.
Ruby despises, hates, generally just can’t stand her battle-axe mother-in-law (Margo Martindale, having a ball with a cane and a mouth that would curdle cold milk).
Ruby, we discover, is looking after only Ruby as she quickly becomes the most ruthless of a murderously ruthless bunch.
That leaves Moss’ Claire, who takes to gangster life as a welcome respite from being her husband’s punching bag.
As she transforms into an avenging fury, Claire sparks a romance with Vietnam vet Gabriel (Domhnall Gleeson). He’s instrumental in showing the suddenly homicidal women how to dismember and dispose of bodies.
With an admirable sense of the period, wavy Farrah Fawcett hair, a city that looks desperately in need of an upgrade and plot points about the mob’s take on the construction of a nearby convention center, “Kitchen” can’t stand alongside that era’s gangster classics. Or our own today.