Review of Gotti (2018) by K Nife C — 01 Jan 2019

"How 'bout the movies? You like - you like - whassat movie you like so much about spaghetti, 'Meatballs' or sumn. Go see that.".

Edited in a blender, this laughably bad biopic of the notorious John Gotti was mired in development hell over the last decade with something like 4 different directors and countless rewrites. The final product is an absolute mess of extremely violent spurts punctuating a boring series of clunky framing devices and Goodfellas-style narration. This is all exacerbated by an incomprehensible plot that would only make sense to someone who has intimate knowledge of Gotti's biography. John Travolta is on a full-boar ham-page chewing scenery and milking his hyperbolic Brooklyn accent rivaled only in its inauthenticity by Little Italy. There's so much unnecessary cursing in the dialogue it would make a sailor in a David Mamet play blush. Then Pitbull does the main theme, if that's any indication of the poor decisions being thrown about in this catastrophic love letter to a horrible criminal.