‘The Kitchen’ Film Review: Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, Elisabeth Moss Lead a Mafia Misfire

Across the long history of gangster movies, women have usually been relegated to molls, mothers, or voices of conscience; sometimes tough, but never in control. “The Kitchen,” a violent gender corrective set in an Irish mafia-run ’70s New York, has other plans, eager to present its trio of Hell’s Kitchen wives — Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish and Elisabeth Moss — as badass, bloodthirsty bosses in their own right. It’s an exploitation flip whose time has surely come, but what writer-director Andrea Berloff has cobbled together around this concept (based on a DC/Vertigo comic book series by Ollie Masters and Ming Doyle) is little more than another tone-challenged stumble through mob clichés as prevalent as the trash, graffiti and flared threads dominating the period design. Coming a year after “Widows” disappointingly wrestled with a similar scenario of women taking on their husbands’ lawbreaking, “The Kitchen” has some of the same problems: a focus on shallow genre mechanics over believable characterization and the nuances of criminal solidarity. Also like “Widows,” “The Kitchen” choppily crams a miniseries’ worth of incident into two hours, which means we get the usual reliance on montage, music cues, and scenes of about four to five spoken lines...