I wanted to like The Kitchen movie more. I really wish it was better. However, The Kitchen is too muddled and rushed to really be worth seeing. That is despite strong performances from all three of its main characters.

Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, and Elizabeth Moss play the wives of mobsters who in the opening scene of the movie are caught and sent to jail. The family agrees to take care of them, that promise turns out to be less than expected mostly thanks to the general fecklessness of the men. So the three women start to take things into their own hands. It starts with taking protection money for local businesses, but starts to expand from there. Things really take off when Domhnall Gleeson shows up. He had to skip town after doing a hit, but is back now that things have cooled. He also has a thing for Elizabeth Moss and no problem being their muscle. The three women not only survive after taking over, they thrive.

They do so in different ways. McCarthy takes charge and mostly keeps her quiet PTA mom persona, but is clearly more in control. The abused Moss almost gleefully takes to her new power, reveling in her role as the wild card. And Haddish stops playing the mousey little wife starts to show her real intelligence and ambition.

There is a lot of stuff that looks good on paper. It is like a lesser Scorsese mob movie in some ways. Good performances from its central characters. It just doesn’t know what to do with them. We get their evolution, but we don’t really see what that means every day for them. We don’t really know what they were like before. We don’t know what they are like after, for that matter. The movie refuses to show things. Moss was abused by her husband, but the movie doesn’t show it, it shows the aftermath and you have to draw conclusions. It will show a lot of murders, but not that. It is one thing to have twists and revelations, this movie makes every development feel like a twist by not giving the viewer enough information to understand the situation.

One problem with the movie is that it doesn’t seem to know what to do with the fact that for all their power, the women are becoming monstrous. That is no different from their husbands or the people they interact with, but the movie refuses to reckon with this idea. McCarthy’s father starts very opposed to what they are doing. He is the only person in the movie that seems to display any discomfort with crime or murder. Other than blood being gross, I guess. The problem is the movie raises these concerns; in part by having her dad brings them up. We, as viewers, want to celebrate the held down Moss finding some control of her life. But are we not to feel disturbed that she shows her growing confidence by killing people? Maybe I misread the movie, I was watching it as something with one foot in realism, but the way it deals with things is more of a cartoon.

The Kitchen just feels like a big a missed opportunity. Some refinement to the themes or a better focus could have turned into a really good mob movie. Instead, we got this scattered mess

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