"The Kitchen" seemingly sunk without a trace upon its release back in 2019, despite being an adaptation of a comic book and staring two comedy talents and the always wonderful Elisabeth Moss. Watching it now, it's easy to see why it couldn't connect.
When their low-level Irish mob husbands are sent to prison for a stick up job, three women, Kathy (Melissa McCarthy), Ruby (Tiffany Haddish) and Claire (Elisabeth Moss) short of money but with some connections, decide to step in and fill the gap. Because they actually provide the services that their husbands long since stopped delivering, they are very successful soon decide to take control of the whole of Hell's Kitchen, which draws the anger of the rest of the Irish families.
The immediate problem, and "The Kitchen" biggest failing for me was that I'm not sure what it was supposed to be. It doesn't help that I wasn't sure going in that it wasn't a comedy, as it a) sounds like a premise for a comedy and b) casts two comedic stars as two of its leads, but watching it you soon get that it isn't. So then you're left with a story about these characters coming up in organised crime, a story that's been well covered by other films before, but here, one where I never had any idea of the scale of the enterprise. They seemed initially to just be collecting from a couple of stores, but then it just seems to get bigger and more successful without ever showing us how, or what, they had to overcome to do so. And then it ends without ever reaching a conclusion. From a storyline point of view, it's a mess.
The performances are fine, I've not enjoyed all of McCarthy's comedic films, but she's probably the standout here. It's just that it's in a film that doesn't really have a story to tell.
