You haven’t heard of Gotti? I don’t blame you, It didn’t even make back half of its $10 million budget and was primarily distributed by the now-defunct Movie Pass. So why are we talking about it? Well firstly, it holds a rare 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Even Freddy Got Fingered managed to scrape an 11% so this has got to be the worst movie ever, right? Further enticing us is the advertising campaign. “Audiences loved Gotti. Critics put out the hit. Who would you trust more? Yourself or a troll behind a keyboard?” After such words, how could one NOT check it out?
Based on the true story, John Gotti (John Travolta) rose through the ranks of New York’s Gambino Crime Family, eventually eliminating its previous leader and replacing him. The film chronicles his 30-year reign as well as his personal life, particularly his relationship with his wife, Victoria (Kelly Preston) and eldest son John “Junior” (Spencer Lofranco).
Honestly, it isn’t really THAT bad. The big green 0% implies a special kind of awful, which it isn’t. This is an extremely vanilla mob film. The performances are just kinda there, nothing about the cinematography, characters, dialogue, etc. stand out. We get the usual suspects of crime films with characters being revealed to be snitches, the police scrambling to make the evidence stick while the crime family eliminates or intimidates witnesses, the media circus which accompanies “The Teflon Don” every time he manages to get acquitted of all charges, etc. You wonder why the film was even made, as it brings nothing new to the genre… except right at the end.
Predominantly told in flashback, the makeup effects Gotti uses on Travolta look are great. The other characters age unconvincingly - mostly because all they do is change clothes and hairdos - but the one responsible for those prosthetics deserves praise. Still, this isn’t really noteworthy. What catches your attention are the conclusions’ bizarre implications. In the clips of John Gotti’s funeral, hundreds mourn him, proclaiming that while he might’ve been a criminal he did good for the community. Right… I just watched two hours of him unrepentantly murder and intimidate people to line his pockets. Worse is a text crawl which implies the Justice System wasted time, effort and money convicting John Gotti Junior when, instead, it should’ve focused on the people who testified against him. Because Jr. couldn’t have simply NOT gone on to become a career criminal. Come on.
The story behind Gotti - the movie, not the man - winds up being more interesting than the film itself. You could pick apart some of the clunky dialogue or the out-of-place soundtrack, the overall execution or why the community embraced him… but why? This is too bland a movie to demand such attention and I wager few people who see it will remember the film down the line. (January 4, 2019)
