This one was a bummer. The trailers looked cool, I was excited to see what the comics were all about, I was excited to see Melissa McCarthy and Tiffany Haddish in serious rolls, and I was invited to an advance screening of the movie, so I was really looking forward to this. So imagine my surprise when it turned out to be a complete train-wreck.
I was enjoying the movie at first, but I realized very quickly that The Kitchen doesn’t know how to movie. After the first 40ish minutes, you could take almost any scene and swap it with any other scene and it would make just as much sense. That includes the ending! I was legitimately surprised when the movie ended because the “climatic” scene felt like just another scene. It wrapped up nothing, it gave the audience nothing, it was nothing.
Every once in a while, the movie would get in a groove and I would get false hope that I had made it through the rough part and it would be smooth sailing from there. It never did. The groove always ended.
That’s not to say that the movie is all bad. It has SOME great ideas and the performances are just as amazing as I hoped. Hopefully casting directors can see the real gold hiding in this shitshow. The movie is also very pretty to look at, due to its plentiful sweeping shots of 70’s New York.
4/10
Movie Mort 