Rent The Kitchen (2019)

Lacklustre Crime Drama - The Kitchen review by GI

Whilst showing great promise this is half baked crime drama that has echoes of Widows (2018) and by the end it's a bit of a shallow and empty film that doesn't seem to know what it wants to be, comedy/drama, gangster.....???? Set in the late 1970s in New York's Hells Kitchen area the wives of three Irish hoodlums, Kathy (Melissa McCarthy), Ruby (Tiffany Haddish) and Claire (Elisabeth Moss), are left destitute when their husbands are imprisoned. So they decide to take over the protection rackets pushing out the incumbent gangster. The trouble is everyone has an agenda and its difficult to trust anyone. There's some violence and the odd squeamish scene, there's some comedy, some melodrama and some gangster stuff, mixed together it all feels unstructured which is a shame because in there is a potentially good film. The support cast isn't bad, Domhnall Gleeson as a hitman and James Badge Dale as one of the husbands but sadly this is a disappointing film.