The Kitchen (2019)
“Can I do the other leg?”
This was the most predictable, unoriginal movie I’ve seen this year…until it wasn’t.
The Kitchen is a lot of things, but the most important is that it is not what it seems.
The premise of the movie is straightforward girl empowerment, with touches of feelgoodism and even a little humor:
A trio of Irish gangsters in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood knock off a store, they are arrested, and their wives, Melissa McCarthy (the smart, nice one), Tiffany Haddish (the sassy one), and Elisabeth Moss (the sensitive one), need to figure out how to make ends meet.
They decide that the best way to pay the bills is to pick up where their husbands left off - working the criminal protection racket.
The first hour is a massively predictable romp into their fun adventure, as they deal with resistance from the sexist male gang leaders, befriend shop owners who thank them for their service to the community (while handing over cash for protection), drink much wine, meet the Mafia, and enjoy the fun and freedom of “making” their own money.
That is the first hour of this hour of this flick and, truth be told, I wasn’t sure I’d make it through the last 40 minutes. It’s not that it was terrible, but everything was so tropish and chewed over that it felt like you are drinking sugar water - hold the water.
Then the movie rolls into the final act and whipsaws into a completely different film. What was a playful game suddenly becomes deadly serious, ultra violent, and much more realistic, with the director, Andrea Berloff, pulling the rug out from under the viewers, wrapping it around them, and proceeding to beat them with a ball-pein hammer.
The Kitchen is Berloff’s first directing gig, but she has good writing chops, scribing Straight Outta Compton and World Trade Center, and she puts a solid troop of actors through their paces. They deliver, especially Haddish, James Badge Dale as her husband, Brian d’Arcy James (First Man) as McCarthy’s husband, and the rapper, Common, who may or may not be able to act, but oozes presence and intensity.
So how does this movie stack up?
Berloff set up me up completely with her saccharine “I am woman hear me roar” intro and the payoff was more than satisfying. The movie included late twists that surprised me, left me saying “ah…that’s why that happened,” and actually made me feel something for the characters. That doesn’t happen often.
On the other hand, the intro - an hour of the 1:40 minute film - went on just a little too long. I suspect the reason the film has only received mediocre scores in reviews is that the people watching it just gave up and didn’t watch the end or decided to multi-task, keeping it on in the background as they caught up on Instagram.
If the front end of The Kitchen was 10 minutes shorter this would been a Four. As it is, it is a very solid and quite respectable Three…and worth watching.
You can catch The Kitchen HERE.
Three out of Five Plates of Cookies.
🍪🍪🍪
Post Credit Bonus!
The Kitchen was based off the DC Vertigo graphic novel of the same name. Not sure how I missed, but will check it out.
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