The Kitchen (3/10)

by Tony Medley

Runtime 103 minutes

R.

Maybe Hollywood needs to rethink films like this that glorify violent, cold-blooded murders. Most are played for shock value as they come when least expected. But like most Hollywood murders, they have little emotional effect.

Worse, maybe, than the violence, and, especially, the macabre scene in which one of the characters demonstrates how to cut up a body, the premise of this film is absurd. Back in the day (maybe still), “protection” for small storeowners was offered by the Mob. But they weren’t offering “protection” against third parties. The protection money paid by the storeowners was to ensure that the Mob itself would leave them alone. It wasn’t in lieu of police protection.

But writer/director Andrea Berloff apparently is clueless about facts and creates a “protection” scheme that actually is supposed to protect storeowners from other people than the mobsters who are running the scheme. She shows that these store owners actually wanted the Mob's "protection!" Yeah, sure.

When three of the mobsters are arrested and sent to prison the Mob doesn’t adequately take care of their wives, Kathy (Melissa McCarthy, Ruby (Tiffany Haddish) and Claire (Elisabeth Moss). So what do they do? They take over the “protection” business from the Mob!

What ensues is beyond the realm of belief, the reason being that the women were not threatening the shop owners with repercussions if they did not sign on with them. No, they were offering “protection,” against third parties, like that which is provided by the police. In real life if they tried this, the Mob would come down hard on the shop owners to prove that the women had no power to protect them from the Mob.

But that’s not what happens in this fantasy. And that’s not surprising because it is based on a comic book series, so forget any connection with reality, even though they place the film in the late ‘70s in the Hell’s Kitchen section of New York City (ergo the name) as if it actually happened.

It was so violent that the young woman sitting next to me (it was a critics’ screenings so I have to assume she was a professional) was jumping and screeching whenever one of the violent or gruesome scenes appeared, which was quite often.

The acting is good and the leads are well supported by people like Domhnall Gleeson, Bill Camp, and Common, among others. But the premise is so counterfactual and the violence so pervasive that this is not a film to recommend unless you get off on brutal violence and silly plots.