Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, and Elisabeth Moss star in this graphic novel adaptation as the wives of three New York gangsters who take over their husbands’ criminal syndicate after the men go to jail in the late 1970s. Writer-director Andrea Berloff frames this as a tale of female empowerment, emphasizing how the heroines gain confidence as they evolve into ruthless crime lords, but since the characters are all one-dimensional, the attempts at catharsis feel canned. Moss, clearly struggling with her underwritten part, delivers the first bad performance I’ve seen from her; she fails to make her character’s transformation from battered wife to hardened killer seem at all plausible. The other two leads fare somewhat better, drawing on their backgrounds in comedy to give their characters a certain amount of charisma; still, I would have preferred to watch them in something less mean-spirited.