Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish and Elisabeth Moss are all stranded in different shades of frustrated wife in this crime drama in desperate search of a tone. When their abusive husbands are carted away by the feds, the three can’t make the rent. Fortunately, they’re able to mob up pretty quickly, with laughably few complications, no learning curve and plenty of polyester tops.
Yes, it sounds like Steve McQueen’s ‘Widows’, but a radically dumbed-down version. With dialogue like, ‘What are we going to do?’, the film’s script is derived from a comic-book series by Ollie Masters and Ming Doyle. Even worse, screenwriter-director Andrea Berloff can’t bring herself to lend her stridently symbolic characters any complexity or weakness. They pack heat and sass (and, presumably, a school lunch or two) and you wonder, post-‘The Sopranos’ and ‘Goodfellas’, who would want to dilute such a widely known universe with this kind of weak-sauce fantasising? No matter: the showdowns have a way of ending abruptly, without any payoff.
Domhnall Gleeson puts in a decent turn as an intense angel of death, but when he’s your feminist Irish mob movie’s most interesting asset, you need to find Hollywood’s witness-protection programme immediately.