The Kitchen review: the undercooked, uneven all-female Goodfellas nobody asked for
Dir: Andrea Berloff. Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, Elisabeth Moss, Domhnall Gleeson, Margo Martindale, Common. Cert: 15, 103 mins
The story of cinema is in many ways the story of men seizing power and influence while women watch from the margins. This historical injustice is now being corrected – off-screen with the MeToo movement and on it with films that put the female perspective front and centre.
Yet there have been misfires. You wanted to love Paul Feig’s all-female Ghostbusters, if only to annoy the tragic fanboys trolling the production. Alas, the movie was a dud. Ocean’s 8, last year’s ladies’s night riff on Ocean 11, meanwhile squandered a winning cast including Cate Blanchett and Sandra Bullock. The sad trombone now toots a third time with Andrea Berloff’s underwhelming attempt at an all-female Goodfellas.
One of the problems with this adaptation of a well-regarded 2015 graphic novel, already a flop in the US, is straightforward miscasting. The always likeable Melissa McCarthy stars as the downtrodden wife of a small time crook in Hell’s Kitchen, New York. But her irrepressibility, that ever-present hint of playfulness, makes her fundamentally ill-suited to the part of the ambitious and ruthless Kathy Brennan.
It’s the late 1970s and even as Scorsese and Coppola are immortalising New York as a gangsters’s paradise, times are changing. The Irish-American clans that for decades ruled Hell’s Kitchen struggle to maintain supremacy as new waves of migrants stream in. The outlook for Kathy and friends Ruby (Tiffany Haddish) and Claire (Elisabeth Moss) turns even bleaker when their criminal husbands are banged up following a botched robbery.
Facing ruin, Kathy and her pals rejuvenate their spouses’s ailing protection racket. They do so simply by politely asking their neighbourhood businesses to cough up their dues. Struggling shops and restaurants are only too happy to be shaken down when three nice ladies are doing the shaking. What the ailing Irish-American underworld needed all along was a woman’s touch.
With cash rolling in, the trio are soon calling the shots over the local hoods. This brings the unwelcome attention of Ruby’s kingpin mother-in-law (Margo Martindale) and of FBI Agent Silvers (rapper Common). Cherishing her freedom from her physically abusive husband Claire meanwhile takes up with string-bean hitman Gabriel (Domhnall Gleeson). He’s a Vietnam vet with a penchant for dismembering bodies in the bath and a traumatic past that draws him to the emotionally-scarred mobster’s dame.
Everyone tries. Unfortunately, the leads appear to believe they’re in three very different films. McCarthy seems forever on the brink of breaking into a grin. Haddish plays it gritty and straight as the scheming Ruby. Moss simply reprises her melodramatic turn from the Handmaid’s Tale. Gleeson, for his part, distracts with his method-y Noo Yawk delivery. He puts so much effort into the accent that he forgets to do anything else with the performance.
The tonal choppiness is reflected in Berloff’s directing as she lurches from grisly body horror to girl power caper and harrowing soap opera. A clunking twist at the end undermines a great deal of what has gone before. But by that point it’s already clear just how little is cooking in the Kitchen.
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