The Kitchen
starring Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, Elizabeth Moss, Domhnall Gleeson, James Badge Dale, Brian d’Arcy James, Margo Martindale, Common and Bill Camp
written and directed by Andrea Berloff
Rating: ♦♦♦♦◊
The Kitchen is a crime drama based on a comic book series. Generally, I hate comic book movies - like superhero tales - because I’m not ten years old, and because the stories are dumb. But I honestly liked this one. It’s not the usual thing I see Melissa McCarthy in, and I might even watch it again some time.
McCarthy, Haddish and Moss play the wives of three Irish gangsters in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York City in 1978. Their husbands are sentenced to three years in prison for robbery. As Irish mob molls they are expected to be passive while the macho men take care of business. The O’Carroll crime family is supposed to take care of the wives of the imprisoned, and when they don’t, the three conspire to take over the business. And they do. The wedge they use to begin their foray into crime is to collect protection money from some of the family’s recalcitrant customers. They hire some muscle, build a reputation for reliability and begin to make progress. Soon they are competing with the larger, older, more established Italian mafia. Next, they must eliminate the O’Carroll matriarch. Finally, when their husbands are released they must be eliminated as well, first, because they’re lousy husbands. Second, because they expect instantly to step back into the O’Carroll family business even though the wives have coopted them and changed the rules. Third, because they are rather incompetent gangsters, after all.