ReelBob: ‘The Kitchen’ ★★

By Bob Bloom

“The Kitchen” rests heavily on a premise that begins to falter rather quickly and, turns to gangland-genre clichés to sustain itself.

The movie, set in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen in 1978 and ’79, stars Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish and Elisabeth Moss, as the wives of a trio of low-level Irish mobsters.

After the FBI arrests the men, they must find a means to earn money, feed their families and survive.

One of the movie’s major drawbacks is how quickly the women devise and execute their plan to basically take over the Irish mob’s protection racket in the area.

It doesn’t help that director Andrea Berloff (screenwriter of “Straight Outta Compton”) portrays most of the mobsters as buffoonish, cliched “Goodfellas”-wanna-bes.

Berloff, who wrote the script based on a DC comic book series, cannot rachet up enough suspense to make us worry about the dangerous obstacles facing McCarthy’s Kathy, Haddish’s Ruby and Moss’ Claire in their gangland rise.

Part of that is because the women are badly drawn, each basically defined by their relationships with their husbands: Kathy and her husband have a seemingly normal and solid marriage with two kids; Ruby’s Irish husband constantly belittles and criticizes her, egged on by his nasty, foul-mouthed mother; and Claire’s husband physically abuses her.

The women are ill-defined, which makes any emotional investment in them difficult to attain.

When the husbands are sentenced to prison, the head of the mob — a man who always seems angry — promises to take care of the women, but the pittance of cash he slips them cannot even cover their rents. And when they ask for more money, he bullies them into submission and they quietly slink away.

Without steady incomes, the trio decide to take matters into their own hands.

At first, using brains rather than brawn, they are successful in running their own protection system that actually safeguards the local stores better than the mob did.

But, as in all such movies, as their success grows, their relationships with each other begin to falter, eventually leading to tragedy.

“The Kitchen” is not a bad movie. It simply lacks the courage of its convictions. Berloff tries to have it both ways — fighting mightily to keep our sympathies vested in Kathy, Ruby and Claire, while darkening their characters.

If she had gone all-in and made them hard-edged bitches, we may not have rooted for them, but at least they would have drawn more of our interest.

And it doesn’t help that the women remain one-note characters. Kathy is the careful, compassionate one who wants to use some of their ill-gotten gain to help the community; Ruby seeks power, money and revenge; and Claire, tired of being a victim, develops an unhealthy aggression that takes her to places she never knew she was capable of visiting.

The gimmick of seeing actors like McCarthy and Haddish, known for their many comic performances, playing bad asses and toting guns is a curiosity that wears thin because of the script’s ineptitude.

Even though she proved in “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” that she can handle drama, McCarthy at times seems lost, as her character either softens or hardens depending on the whims of the screenwriter.

“The Kitchen” is a brutal feature that offers some taut and sickening comic sequences — the women are shown how to dismember a body so it can be disposed in a river — but it fails to fully take advantage of the talent of its three stars, as well as the potential of the story.

Despite a decent body count, “The Kitchen” is a crime thriller that mostly shoots blanks.

I am a founding member of the Indiana Film Journalists Association. My reviews appear at ReelBob (reelbob.com) and Rottentomatoes (www.rottentomatoes.com). I also review Blu-rays and DVDs. I can be reached by email at bobbloomjc@gmail.com or on Twitter @ReelBobBloom. Links to my reviews can be found on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

THE KITCHEN
2 stars out of 4
(R), graphic violence, sexual content, language