The Kitchen
Directed by: Andrea Berloff
Written by: Andrea Berloff - Based on the comic by Ollie Masters and Ming Doyle
Starring: Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, Elisabeth Moss, Domhnall Gleeson, Bill Camp, Margo Martindale, Brian d'Arcy James, James Badge Dale, Jeremy Bobb, Myk Watford, Common, Alicia Coppola, James Ciccone, John Sharian, Matt Helm
Action/Crime/Drama - 102 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 7 Aug 2019
Written by: Andrea Berloff - Based on the comic by Ollie Masters and Ming Doyle
Starring: Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, Elisabeth Moss, Domhnall Gleeson, Bill Camp, Margo Martindale, Brian d'Arcy James, James Badge Dale, Jeremy Bobb, Myk Watford, Common, Alicia Coppola, James Ciccone, John Sharian, Matt Helm
Action/Crime/Drama - 102 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 7 Aug 2019
Etta James kicks off The Kitchen with her soulful tune, “It’s a Man’s Man’s World,” while a Manhattan panoramic shot glides over 1978 scenery, notices the imposing skyscrapers, and gently lands amidst the perpetually-stuffed trashcans of the aptly named Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. The Kitchen’s three female protagonists are all too familiar with this man’s world. One suffers physical abuse, one is emotionally abused, and one dutifully raises the kids while their three husbands bungle an armed robbery and shuffle off to prison. What has all the ingredients for a juicy, female-empowered crime drama, complete with an accomplished cast and superior production design, emerges as a God-awful mess of mish-mashed scenes, choppy pacing, and downright laughable attempts to shock and surprise.
The husbands are middle men in what passes for the Hell’s Kitchen low-rent protection racket. With no money coming in and the typecast mob boss failing to keep them afloat, the ladies take matters into their own hands. They know the streets and all the people in them. They know what belongs, what is out of place, and gradually scrounge the confidence to organize, hire some muscle, and take over Hell’s Kitchen as the neighborhood’s new wise guys… or gals. “There is no place for us out there,” moans the housewife. “I’m tired of being knocked around,” the abuse victim rails. Naturally, the old guard don’t take too kindly to some broads invading a man’s turf and The Kitchen lapses into its frequent and all too random graphic violence. Instead of knocking us off balance, these abrupt gunshots to the skull and bone saws to the joints come off as camp instead.
The husbands are middle men in what passes for the Hell’s Kitchen low-rent protection racket. With no money coming in and the typecast mob boss failing to keep them afloat, the ladies take matters into their own hands. They know the streets and all the people in them. They know what belongs, what is out of place, and gradually scrounge the confidence to organize, hire some muscle, and take over Hell’s Kitchen as the neighborhood’s new wise guys… or gals. “There is no place for us out there,” moans the housewife. “I’m tired of being knocked around,” the abuse victim rails. Naturally, the old guard don’t take too kindly to some broads invading a man’s turf and The Kitchen lapses into its frequent and all too random graphic violence. Instead of knocking us off balance, these abrupt gunshots to the skull and bone saws to the joints come off as camp instead.
Kathy, the homemaker (Melissa McCarthy, The Happytime Murders), emerges as the leader. Her Irish-American roots go all the way back and she is genuinely sad to see her husband marched off to Rikers. The wife with the smirk on her face at the trial is Claire Walsh (Elisabeth Moss, Us). Her husband refreshes the bruises on her face when they begin to fade and this timid mouse of a woman can barely hide her bubbling glee at the prospect of three long years without the man of the house. The third group member is Ruby O’Carroll (Tiffany Haddish, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part), an awkward fit as an African-American wife in an Irish mob circle who chafes under the thumb of her sandpaper-hard mother-in-law (Margo Martindale, Cars 3). As a group, the women make a convincing case they could do a better job than the current low-life thugs and quickly run the streets – “protecting” businesses, chasing off pimps, and even securing meaningful employment for all the local union construction workers.
This plot overview makes the film sound more coherent and sane than it really is. At some points, the women squabble with one another for no other reason than it is time to squabble. Domhnall Gleeson (Peter Rabbit) signs on as the group’s hitman and body dismemberment instructor. His acting choices will divide the audience. Some may call it brave and emblematic of possible PTSD. Others will celebrate his entry on the list alongside Eddie Redmayne’s performance in Jupiter Ascending – a supporting character for the ages. Tiffany Haddish is a bit wooden in her first dramatic performance but the superstar of the ensemble is Moss. Elisabeth Moss has no business being so good in a film this bad. Her metamorphosis from trembling wallflower to pistol-packing badass is revelatory – she steals any and all scenes she’s in, including the ones with McCarthy, and operates on a higher plane than the rest combined. I’ve been a fan of Moss since her early days on The West Wing and particularly enjoy her indie work, but her performance in The Kitchen is superlative.
Andrea Berloff aimed for an epic. She wants a female-driven, 102 minute Godfather; however, the enterprise is about as effective as a lackluster Sopranos episode. There are so many scattershot sub-threads to wrap up, the one’s they even bother to provide closure to, the morass descends into episodic plot scenes of this person must die, then this one, then this funeral, and then this death over here… The sum is less than its parts because who empathizes with a Whack-a-Mole game? Ambition - check. Cast - check. Put it all together in a story ready to throttle the audience, grab them by the collar, make them care, make them tense, make them cry…not so much. This is Berloff’s inaugural turn as director, but she has major script credits under her belt such as Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center and Straight Outta Compton. She adapts her own script here from the DC Vertigo comic book miniseries the story is based on, but perhaps she was too close. A late in the game script doctor may have rescued Berloff’s dream.
There is a moment where Haddish’s Ruby asks her mother, “Why did you beat me growing up?” Mom replies, “Our family aren’t fighters. I beat you cuz I had to hammer the soft out of you.” The theater erupted at the lunacy of this speech - I suspect Berloff was not going for chuckles here. Berloff bites off too much. Perhaps you cannot cover a notorious neighborhood like Hell’s Kitchen with such a jaunty, punch drunk crime thriller script. The character clichés strut around wearing their blue collar, Irish roots on their sleeves with pride like, “Hell’s Kitchen may be a shithole, but it’s our shithole!” A surprise plot twist at the end, with no believable setup and uncharacteristically shoddy performances trying to sell it, detracts from the neighborhood mystique and gravity of the violence the women have unleashed. And it’s a shame. I believe Hell’s Kitchen looked like this in 1978. Elisabeth Moss unleashes a gargantuan performance. What a waste.
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