Review of Gotti (2018) by Thequietgamer — 23 Nov 2018

I can't think of a single thing I liked about Gotti. A movie so bad it doesn't even have trash cinema appeal. The biopic is largely a series of random, uninteresting vignettes that are presented in non-chronological order. The way it jumps around through time makes it hard to follow the action and all you'll really be doing is watching a bunch of old dudes have conversations where they constantly reference people we don't know anyways. It isn't until roughly the first 50 minutes go by that it starts telling the story we actually came to see.

I can't tell if John Travolta's performance is good or not. Just that he's incredibly dedicated. So much so that he lent his cars and brought his wife onto the project. Part of me believes the reason he was so invested in the film was because it's subject lost a son just like he did. It gets a few pity points from me for that.

Rapper Pitbull's soundtrack is almost laughably bad. Apparently he didn't know these are a different kind of gangsters than those his music typically embellishes. It's just so awkward and out of place.

When the movie does finally start portraying the rise and fall of the "Teflon Don" rather than its poor and difficult to follow attempts to humanize him, it becomes a much better watch. People start getting whacked, verdicts on court cases are revealed, and the film gets some much needed focus. The transitions between things like Gotti chilling with his family (crime or otherwise) to getting ready to hang for his crimes are still nonexistent, but at least it's comprehensible at this point.

I would be remiss to not mention Travolta's opening and closing narrations. The only parts of the film that are bad enough to laugh at. Two moments of purely unintentional comedic gold. The rest of the movie though is a soul-crushing bore. So don't come into this expecting something that's so bad, it's funny like I did.

The whole thing feels unsure of what parts of Gotti's story it wants or even needs to tell. So after years in development hell and changing many hands, the people who finally ended up with the project haphazardly slapped together a bunch of different ideas and released this incoherent mess of a movie. It's lifeless, disorganized, and you're probably just better off reading a Wikipedia article on the true story.

2.