THE KITCHEN  2.3***

The Kitchen, is a double entendre, referring to women’s traditional place, but also to Hell’s Kitchen, the Manhattan neighborhood which in the late ’70s was home to poor working-class families and Irish American gangs like the one portrayed here.

Kathy (Melissa McCarthy), Ruby (Tiffany Haddish), and Claire (Elizabeth Moss) are the wives of three small-time Irish crime bosses in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen in 1978. When the men are sent to prison, the financially strapped women decide to take over their husbands’ work, gathering protection money from local businesses. The organization-minded Kathy becomes an empowered community leader. Ruby’s ruthlessness and uncompromising negotiating tactics help the women get what they deserve. Claire, whose husband, Rob, abused her, uses the opportunity to learn to defend herself (and how to efficiently dismember and dispose of a body), and she eventually becomes the group’s enforcer, alongside her partner, Gabriel (and Claire’s sometime lover).

The three lead actresses and the rest of the cast work hard but the poor script fails them. But I have to say I had a hard time imagining Melissa McCarthy as a bad-ass mobster .. so that did not work for me at all.  The writing  is messy, uneven, and somewhat bland. It’s also hard to root for the characters. After all, they become full-fledge criminals and murderers.  The movie just feels like a lot of disjointed scenes that don’t always connect into a story, leading to a third act twist that feels both forced and obvious. Also Gangster films rely heavily on tension, and unfortunately that is lacking in this movie.

Essentially, The Kitchen is a movie that I wanted to like more than I did. It’s not a terrible movie but ends up being a disappointing waste of talent.

Rated R for violence, language throughout and some sexual content