Film Review: The Kitchen

"Times Change. You Do What You Got To Do. Some Hits. For Money, You Survive..."

Based on the comic book series of the same name published by Vertigo Comics, an offshoot of DC Comics which was intended to promote graphic comics suitable for a more "adult" audience, The Kitchen is both the big screen adaptation of the original series created by both Ollie Masters and Ming Doyle, and the directorial debut of Andrea Berloff, an American filmmaker best known so far for writing credits on the excellent, Straight Outta Compton, and the not-so excellent, Jamie Foxx starring, Sleepless. Coined by the film's production company as being an "edgy and subversive" addition into the crime genre, Berloff's movie follows a very Widows inflicted central narrative, one which sees our three central female characters attempt to pick up the crime-inflicted mantle of their now incarcerated husbands in order to stay afloat in the late 1970's society in which the notion of the male breadwinner was very much still at the forefront of the nuclear family. Whilst I am all for a gender-bendered approach to a genre which is still reeling in the shadow of The Godfather and Goodfellas, Berloff's movie is the type of big screen turkey which almost falls into the category of so bad it's good, an awfully mis-handled raspberry of a movie which fails on every single fundamental level of how to actually make a working movie, a high profile example of a director who seems to have been given a big-budget project slightly too soon and has ultimately crippled under the pressure with dire and laughably bad results. 

Pushed as a serious crime drama, The Kitchen attempts to sell the idea of three women with little to no experience of the criminal underworld suddenly strong-arming the entire Irish crime syndicate within the heart of Hell's Kitchen, New York, in order to keep afloat their own individual lives after relying on their male counterparts for so long. Whilst the whole notion of fiction is to imagine a world away from our own, one of the primary issues of Berloff's movie is undoubtedly the cast choices, with both Melissa McCarthy (Spy) and Tiffany Haddish (Night School), actors both primarily known for cutting their acting chops in comedy, whose move into a picture which requires a certain level of dramatic expressionism not exactly paying off, with McCarthy once again failing to provide me with evidence that she can actually play anyone other then herself and Haddish laughably terrible as she attempts to evoke some sense of believability to her paper thin character. Whilst the usually reliable presence of Elizabeth Moss (Us) is also woefully mishandled, with her wildly inconsistent character mute for half of the movie and then seemingly drunk for the other half, the whole sensibility of The Kitchen feels like a half-baked Saturday Night Live sketch, one written by a first year university undergraduate with a pure hatred for the male sex and one directed by someone who simply cannot get to grips with the subject matter whatsoever, and whilst Berloff's movie did make me laugh out loud on occasion due to how simply awful the whole thing is, The Kitchen is an absolute stinker of a movie and a high profile example of how not to make a comic book adaptation.  

Overall Score: 3/10