The promise of a tasty top-line cast – Melissa McCarthy, Elisabeth Moss and Tiffany Haddish – and a lip-smacking premise – the wives of three Irish gangsters muscle in on their husbands’ racket while the men languish in jail – evaporates almost immediately in this thuddingly inept crime picture.
Adapted by writer and first-time director Andrea Berloff from a comic book series, this is one-dimensional storytelling that seems to have been edited with oven gloves, and which suffers in comparison with the superficially similar Widows. It’s quite an achievement to combine career low points for all three of the female leads, but a film that spends so much time capturing shots of characters walking sassily through the streets of 70s Hell’s Kitchen at the expense of characterisation clearly has its priorities fried.
Add to that the scrambled logic that argues that extorting protection payments with threats and menaces is somehow “doing good things for the neighbourhood” and you have a film awash with blood and strafed with bullets in which the main crime is the waste of the talent involved.
