Movie Reaction: The Kitchen

Formula: Goodfellas - "Contemporary American Poultry"

It's pretty rare that I have no idea what to do with a movie. What is The Kitchen and what is it trying to be? It's a mob movie. I'm sure of that. It's about three wives of Irish mobsters in the 1970s taking control of the operation in Hell's Kitchen. It's a drama. That needs to be stated, because the casting makes that murky. The three wives are played by Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, and Elisabeth Moss. If I see that group, my first instinct is "comedy", even though McCarthy has proven that she has some versatility, Moss mainly works in drama, and Haddish is new enough on the scene that I don't know her range. The writer/director is known for writing straight dramas like World Trade Center and Straight Outta Compton. So, The Kitchen is a period Irish mob drama, with a female empowerment twist, featuring actresses playing somewhat against type.

Still, no matter what I heard about it, I couldn't stop myself from thinking "This is going to be a funnier Widows".

The Kitchen doesn't work. I'd like to leave it at that, because it really is a movie that doesn't work from beginning to end. It's a movie where I understood point A, I understood point B, but I didn't understand how it got from point A to point B.

The movie start with the husbands of the three women getting arrested by the FBI while they're robbing some local store. They go to jail on 3-year sentences. The wives realize that the Irish mob isn't going to take care of them while the husbands are in jail, so they sort of just take over the Irish mob. I was super fuzzy about how they did this. They take over collections at a lot of businesses. Domhnall Gleeson shows up as their enforcer at some point. And that's about it. I have no idea what the hierarchy of the Irish mob was supposed to be. I don't even know if the husbands were high or low ranking (or what that would even mean). The women do kill a lot of people. Half the movie is set at the assorted funerals. To a comical degree. I think some murders are hoorah moments. More are cold-blooded and excessive though. In most movies, after this kind of death toll, we aren't supposed to be rooting for these protagonists at all. But I think we're supposed to still like them by the end in this one. Eventually, they start working with the Italian mafia and the husbands get out of jail. It's assumed that the husbands will wrestle control away from them, but all the husbands are too useless for that to be believable. Seriously, they are utterly incompetent and barely even characters. It's hard to ever see them as a threat.

Oh, and there's a big twist. Here's a good way to determine that you aren't enjoying a movie. When there's a big twist and your response is "So what?", as opposed to "Oh my god" or "that's pretty clever", then you know the movie isn't working.

The performances were more wrong than they were bad. Melissa McCarthy is two completely different characters scene to scene. Sometimes she's a mousy, uncertain housewife who is in way over her head. Other times, she's a ball-busting don. I'd buy it if the movie sold it as a transformation of her character, but that isn't what it's doing. McCarthy can totally play this kind of role, but not well as it's written for this movie. Haddish is asked to drop all of the charisma that made her a fast-rising star and plays the role totally straight. She seems determined to fight every instinct that makes her interesting on screen. Moss is the closest to playing something she's played before and it's still not very interesting. Her character essentially falls in love and goes feral at the same time. The logic behind her character is something like, "she was abused by her husband, so now she's damaged, so now she's losing touch with her humanity". It's a reductive way of looking at abuse. Gleeson, who I've determined is my favorite actor, is present without being given anything interesting to do. He's introduced with the reputation of being insane then spends the rest of the movie acting completely normal except for the fact that he's desensitized from violence.

I won't say that this movie should've been a comedy. Instead, I'll say that it spends as much time trying not to be a comedy as it does being a drama. There's a dark comedy version of this movie that could've been great. Half the performances in the movie even play like they belong in a dark comedy. This is a fun, pulpy premise. I wish the movie would've allowed itself to take advantage of some of that. Instead, it's a lot of self-seriousness, painfully obvious needle drops, and on the nose dialogue. I'm certain I'll dislike other movies more this year. I'm not sure I'll find one that feels like a bigger failure though.

Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend