Gotti (2018)

Directed by: Kevin Connolly | 110 minutes | biography, crime | Actors: John Travolta, Kelly Preston, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Spencer Rocco Lofranco, Stacy Keach, Lydia Hull, Chris Mulkey, Megan Leonard, Leo Rossi, William DeMeo, Patrick Borriello, Shea Buckner, Chris Kerson, Tyler Jon Olson, Luis Da Silva Jr., Denise Barone, Michael Woods, Jordan Trovillion, Ashley Drew Fisher

The distributors of ‘Gotti’ cannot be denied some self-mockery. When the reviews of this gangster epic trickled out, it turned out that the film hadn’t gotten a single positive review, which would culminate in an infamous zero percent score on the collection site ‘Rotten Tomatoes’. Reason for the distributors to exploit this in their campaign for the film: ‘the film that is used as a punch bag by critics, but is loved by the public’. Now you may wonder which audience, because the film mercilessly flopped in America, so that ‘Gotti’ did not get a theatrical release here at all. And the Dutch film viewer can be extremely grateful to the distributor for that.

The film tells the story of the rise and fall of mob boss John Gotti (John Travolta). Gotti quickly made a career in one of the largest New York mafia families of the twentieth century and seized power after the liquidation of the top boss. Parallel to this storyline, we follow the fallen Gotti who spends his days in prison and turns out to be seriously ill. Meanwhile, he tries to safeguard his legacy through his son.

It’s impossible to go see ‘Gotti’ without keeping the negative reviews in mind. It ensures that the expectations are so low that it can actually only be better than expected. However, the makers have miraculously succeeded in defying this assumption, because ‘Gotti’ is such a huge mess that the film still amazes you with the shockingly shabby quality.

Now, of course, there are always bad movies that you can enjoy; it never hurts to laugh at a sad quality. But there’s also a category of movies that are so bad that you wonder why you’re actually surrendering yourself to the cinema drain. ‘Gotti’ can easily be placed in the latter category. Whether it’s the lousy acting, the completely wrongly chosen soundtrack or the intensely messy build-up: ‘Gotti’ succeeds astonishingly in showing what a film should absolutely not be.

It is clear from everything that director Kevin Connolly (best known as an actor from the ‘Entourage’ series) tries very hard to imitate ‘The Sopranos’ or ‘Goodfellas’, but these productions had something that happened in ‘Gotti’ during the entire playing time is omitted: talent in front of and behind the camera. The fact that the run-up to ‘Gotti’ was characterized by setback after setback (the production process took about eight years) is also clearly reflected in the film. The film drifts back and forth through time like a drunken sailor and seems edited by a primary school student who was allowed to spend a day at the local film school.

A charismatic protagonist or a slightly intriguing script could have saved a movie like ‘Gotti’ a little. However, John Travolta is mainly busy throughout the film to show that John Travolta plays John Gotti. The poster boy of yesteryear never manages to break free from himself, so that you cannot get involved at all in the inner twists and life world of Gotti. The fact that the script mainly consists of one-liners that can’t stand the daylight does not help Travolta’s acting either. As an actor, try to pronounce sentences like ‘it’s all falling together, that’s how life works’ as if you really mean it. Travolta tries very hard, but never rises above the level of local amateur theatre.

Still, the most painful moments are the moments when the film stubbornly tries to be a family drama. In this way Connolly stubbornly tries to provide the story and its protagonist with some depth that it almost becomes pompous. With this script and accompanying acting, this was already a hopeless mission in advance. But the biggest problem of ‘Gotti’, and that really is a performance with a film that pretends to be a mafia epic, is that the film is excruciatingly boring. ‘Gotti’ does not sparkle for a second, has a poignant lack of flair and is populated by actors who have been told to look very angry in order to appear intimidating.

Although negative publicity can indeed lead to an uncontrollable curiosity, it is better to really leave ‘Gotti’ for what it is. The film takes over a hundred minutes of your life that you will never get back and is such a fiasco that it is not even funny anymore. There would probably have been quite an interesting movie in ‘Gotti’, and the character was probably fascinating enough to serve as source material, but not noticeable here for a second. After seeing ‘Gotti’, it mainly seems that this villain has run away from an old cartoon, rather than that this has been one of the most dangerous mafiosi in American history. With a glaring lack of humour, a screenplay made up of Xenos tile wisdom, and a John Travolta once again demonstrating its expiration date, ‘Gotti’ confirms that the ‘Rotten Tomatoes’ score couldn’t have been a percent higher. have to fall.