I Went To See 'Gotti' And FOLKS

Disclaimer: This blog is going to be split into two parts. This half is from before seeing it, and the second half is after seeing it. 

‘Gotti’ currently has a whopping ZERO percent critic score on Rotten Tomatoes after 23 reviews which is impressively bad. So much so, that I resolved to see what all the negative press is all about. Starring John Travolta, this movie was directed by Kevin Connolly, aka E from Entourage aka never-mad-online guy. It was announced the movie in 2011, but went through some serious production hell as noted by Hollywood Reporter:

“Since first being announced in 2011, the project has gone through a quartet of directors; its IMDb page lists 44 producers, executive producers and co-producers; and just this past December, its future appeared in doubt when distributor Lionsgate Premiere pulled it from the release schedule just 10 days before the movie was to hit theaters.”

Moviepass, which I recently proclaimed my belief in, invested in this movie as one of their first moves since moving into production. While their first buy, American Animals, seems to be a home run, this seems to be a comically bad, 360 degree cartoon-type strikeout. This pivot is looking remarkably average so far.

As far as the actual flick goes, it’s being called the worst movie about organized crime ever. Which is pretty unbelievable as someone who watched 1991’s ‘Mobsters‘ starring Christian Slater, Michael Gambon (yea that’r right, Dumbledore played a mob boss), and fucking Richard Grieco.

So I’m definitely a skeptic, but as a connoisseur of mob movies, I’m keeping an open mind going into it. I’m just not sure I can label anything else as the “worst mob movie of all time”.

—————————–

Well, that was the worst mob movie of all time. I have no idea what Connolly, the editors, or producers were thinking moving forward with this as the finished product, but god damn that was one of the most laughably awful movies I have ever seen.

I didn’t know the structure of this movie and apparently neither did Connolly at any point. It stylistically resembles an amalgam of every mob movie ever made and seems to fight against itself at every turn. I feel bad, because Travolta wasn’t terrible,  but every other actor/actress in this movie was puuuuutridly bad. Especially Spencer Rocco Lofranco who played John Gotti Jr. It might just have been that they wrote him like a Shakespearean poet when he is a mobster, but none of his lines were delivered well. Also, half the actors were very obviously Italian and spoke with Italian-New Yorker accents and the other half were very clearly non-Italians and didn’t even bother try to do accents. It’s probably the least cohesive movie I have ever seen in my entire life, and totally deserving of its 0% rating.

It starts with Gotti doing one of these:

He’s in the afterlife, and basically saying “EYYYY LOOK AT NEW YAWK IF U CAN MAKE IT HEA YOUS CAN MAKE IT ANYWHERE”. Then it cuts to Travolta playing young Gotti in the 70’s, then it cuts to him playing old Gotti in the 2000’s, then it cuts to middle age Gotti in the 80’s, then it cuts to old Gotti, then Young Gotti, and over and over and over. The narrator switches from Gotti Sr. to Gotti Jr. at random points, then indiscriminately jumps between locations across the tristate area without ever seeming to go back to the same place twice. They also randomly cut between B-roll they shot and B-roll made in the 80’s. If a scene required more than 3 70’s town cars, old b-roll. If it only needed a small set they didn’t have to cordon off, new b-roll.

Lastly, the most laughably bad but amazing part of the whole movie was that the whole movie was scored by Pitbull.

I don’t know if they gave him a stake in the movie as payment, but he was HEAVILY featured throughout. The movie starts with that aforementioned Captiain America sequence, and he is played off to b-roll of Gotti news footage while this plays.

He is featured again in multiple scenes, including a 1980’s Italian pride festival in which two different Pitbull songs are played including “Give me everything” and I think followed by “Time of our lives”. It absolutely hilarious how out of place it is, but that’s part of what places ‘Gotti’ on the enjoyably bad category on the spectrum of shitty movies.

ONE BITE EVERYONE KNOWS THE RULES

Don’t forget to subscribe to Lights, Camera, Pod, follow us on Twitter, follow us on Instagram and join in on the conversation on our Reddit.