Synopsis
The mobster husbands of three 1978 Hell's Kitchen housewives are sent to prison by the FBI. Left with little but a sharp ax to grind, the ladies take the Irish mafia's matters into their own hands — proving unexpectedly adept at everything from running the rackets to taking out the competition… literally.
Your Movie Library
Cast
- Melissa McCarthyKathy Brennan
- Tiffany HaddishRuby O'Carroll
- Elisabeth MossClaire Walsh
- Domhnall GleesonGabriel O'Malley
- Bill CampAlfonso Coretti
- Margo MartindaleHelen O'Carroll
- CommonGary Silvers
- James Badge DaleKevin O'Carroll
- Brian d'Arcy JamesJimmy Brennan
- Jeremy BobbRob Walsh
Recommendations
- 58
IndieWire
Despite some major narrative missteps, the film’s bold twist on the mob drama still has a refreshing quality. Maybe The Kitchen would have fared better as a series, with more time for its potential material to simmer. - 50
Movie Nation
As the picture sputters and stalls, losing its quick pace and brutal efficiency in the later acts, this comic book adaptation reveals the flaws in its execution, if not its very origins. - 50
Chicago Sun-Times
It gets to the point where it hardly matters to us who lives and who dies, because they’re all stone-cold killers. - 50
Screen Daily
The Kitchen may prove to be a meaningful time-capsule document, but is far less successful as broad entertainment. - 50
The Hollywood Reporter
What's missing in this Kitchen is heat. A B-movie summer diversion at best, it's more a collection of genre tropes than an involving crime drama. - 50
USA Today
They’re made women in an underworld that doesn’t want them, and while that theme is sufficiently explored, The Kitchen disappointingly fails to explore the racial politics it hints at and, aside from the main trio, is full of characters who feel paper thin. The results aren’t criminal, per se, but the movie more often finds mediocrity instead of real nuance. - 50
Variety
We see, in Melissa McCarthy’s increasingly fierce performance, a hint of what the movie might have been: the tale of a new kind of feminine mystique — a methodical fury that weds the imperatives of a mother to the style of a gangster. But that movie needed a better script. - 42
The Playlist
Because we’re living in the worst timeline, these actors and concept are wasted in a movie that lacks spark, flavor, spice, and generally anything that generates or even resembles substantive heat.
