One of the tell-tale signs a movie is going to be a bomb, they do not allow film critics to screen it until it has been officially released. This movie wasn’t screened for critics AT ALL. It’s still sitting at a zero on Rotten Tomatoes. Even after hearing that this movie was particularly bad, the fellas and I still went ahead and watched Gotti, against all our better judgment. I don’t even want to say my It sure was a movie line. Was it? We take the bullet for everyone and tell you why Gotti sucked.
Get ready to turn your brightness all the way up! The first thing we all noticed was the terrible style of this flick. Everything is very dark and barely lit. It felt like squinting my way through Underworld all over again. I said to the guys, maybe they’re trying to make this feel dark like Gotti is the darkness and he lives in the shadows. Ty immediately started laughing at me and said he thought I was giving the film too much credit. Once we turned the brightness up from 31 to like 70, we understood why everything looked so dark and over saturated. This looks like it was filmed on an HD handheld from BJ’s. When you turn up the light, it’s a student film at best.
I also couldn’t stop looking at all of the avocado green tones in this movie. Suddenly, I started putting it together. Everything is bathed in either avocado green, bright red, or off white intentional lighting. Holy shit, it’s the Italian flag! As if those terrible Italian American accents weren’t enough, they actually bathed the film in the colors of Italy. All of this before we even get to the dialogue, acting, or non-existent plot of the movie! It was that distracting.
John Travolta playing John Gotti. I’d like to preface this with Ty’s research, showing that the Gotti family actually requested that John Travolta play him. It kind of makes sense. Travolta is Italian. He is known for playing the iconic Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever, a film that probably would have defined an era for someone like John Gotti. So the casting isn’t that irrational.
Travolta’s wife, Kelly Preston, takes on the role of Victoria Gotti. She’s a real actress with a lot of good solid work behind her. But this…. This is embarrassing for both of them. Travolta is playing this like it’s an impression. An impression of an impression of John Gotti. Nothing about his look or voice is correct. At the end when John Gotti is dying of Cancer, they make him look far worse and far older. One thing about Gotti, he always looked good. The hair was always perfection above all else, even in ill health. And Kelly Preston, her accent is so bad! It’s as if she put on the wig and went oh there’s the character, and just let the hair do the work for her. Her character doesn’t age or progress in any way. She just Italian stereotype screams her way from one event to the next. It’s revolting.
They must have had the greatest sale on tanner ever. All of the actors in the movie had a professional makeup artist, but still manage to look orange and streaky! Watch the funeral scene for their son, who is hit by a car and killed. Don’t mess with the brightness - just watch the scene. The contrast of the darkness, the color saturation and the overuse of tanner make several people appear to be in blackface. I was screaming with laughter out of the sheer ridiculousness. What could be more inappropriate than a funeral in blackface?
The director of the film is Kevin Connelly, from the cast of Entourage. I think he really wanted this to be a gangster film of the likes of Scorsese or Coppola. He tries to use Scorsese’s ironic use of pop music in long cuts that don’t work at all. It’s like a child trying to mimic mom and dad at work.
While we are talking about filming, 2 things. In one of the first scenes, John Travolta is in bed and talking to one of his henchmen. Travolta starts to get up out of bed, tips to the right and you hear a very audible Pee Wee Herman like ‘ahhhhhhhh’ as he falls over and cut to the next scene. WHO KEPT THAT IN!?! It was clearly a mistake! We could not stop laughing at it. It was rewound over and over. It definitely is there. OMG. And second, several scenes have the tops of people's’ heads or foreheads walking out of frame in close up, like someone mounted a camera to a doorway and just let that shit ride. There are also mistakes like Pitbull music playing in a bar when the scene takes place in 1985. In one of the street scenes, you can clearly see Wrigley Field in Chicago, but the film very obviously takes place in New York. The technical aspects are garbage. Did no one edit this? Or look at dailies?
When we review a movie we usually go through the plot beat by beat, warning our readers that we do use spoilers. However, this fucking movie was so incoherent, it was impossible for all three of us to follow. Thank goodness they stuff this movie with actual news reports from the Gotti crime family antics. One report is so long and so detailed, you feel like you know the murder victim’s life story with the most ubiquitous details. ...and then Mr. Miller had a sandwich, two guys came in and also had a sandwich. Everyone loved their sandwich. Then the guy looked at the owner, the owner looked at the guy, they both wanted a sandwich…
All the news filler is easily a half an hour of footage - that’s over a ¼ of the film. Good job guys. The filler was the best part.
On top of that, because the film is so dark, you can’t tell who anyone is most of the time. They do post new characters names on the screen with dates and locations for certain key moments, which is helpful. But it’s so dark that you wouldn’t be able to identify those characters anyway.
You know the movie starts and ends with John Gotti in jail. You know it ends with his passing away. All the crimes in between are just like, wait, what? Who? What’s that? I can’t see. What happened? Why is everything GREEN?!?
There, you’ve just had the Gotti experience. I just saved you from almost 2 hours you’ll never get back. You’re welcome.
Overall, this is a movie where everyone made the worst possible choices and it shows. It had 37, yes that is not a typo, 37 different producers. It had the input of the Gotti family as well. It also took 10 years to get this shit made. That is a lot of people trying to get what they want out of this. With that many people making notes and changes, it was doomed from the start.
The Best Parts - uhhh….. nope
The Worst Parts - EVERYTHING
References:
IMDB - Gotti page - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1801552/
What the Flick!?! Gotti Movie Review - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFpDWvDeLv0
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