Razzie Review: Gotti (2018)

https://lebeauleblog.com/2019/02/23/razzie-review-gotti-2018/

The “winners” of this year’s Golden Raspberry Awards, aka “the Razzies”, were announced earlier today. Sadly, John Travolta’s laughable mob movie, Gotti, went home empty-handed. Kevthewriter has a review of this worthy nominee.

Here are two actual lines from Gotti:

“Why don’t you go see that movie about spaghetti you love so much? Meatballs or something?”

“The doctors said he died of cancer but I think he died of a broken heart”

I know I’ve changed my worst movie of 2018 three times now but I think you can forgive me for those two lines alone. My god this movie was awful!

Gotti, for some reason, jumps between three points-of-view, going from John Travolta talking about the movie to the audience to Travolta talking to his son in jail about sucking up to the feds to the rise and fall of John Gotti’s empire. This isn’t necessary and you could have dropped him talking to the audience or him talking to his son and it wouldn’t have hurt the movie at all. Including both, if anything, just makes things more confusing.

In this movie, things just happen as there are times where things come out of nowhere. At one point, for instance, Stacy Keach’s Father-in-Law is just fine and, in the next scene, he’s dead.

The movie also basically glorifies John Gotti. Listen, The Godfather is my favorite movie of all time, I’m not against making movies that say bad people, even the mob, are capable of good things. The problem is the movie only focuses on Gotti’s love for his children and how beloved he was with his community and, whenever the movie does portray bad things he did, it’s either off-screen or it’s portrayed as something he didn’t do. It’s like the biopic version of Venom, a movie about a bad guy that’s afraid of actually being a movie about a bad guy.

The makeup is terrible. The makeup to make John Travolta look younger and older makes him instead look like a wax statue of a young-ish man and an old man. The movie also doesn’t bother to age anyone else, not even Spencer Lofranco who looks like a teenager when he’s playing a teenager and when he’s playing a fortysomething man. It gets weird when, in the end, he goes to hug his grown up kids and they look more like his siblings than his kids.

The cinematography is weird. There are times where the camera goes side to side and up and down while the characters are just talking, as if Director Kevin Connolly was figuring out how to shoot the scene as the camera was already rolling. Student films wouldn’t make that mistake, let alone a theatrically released movie with a big star. The music tries too hard to make scenes emotional and the music ends up sounding more corny than the emotion it’s supposed to be going for.

The acting is mostly terrible. John Travolta never rises above a caricature version of a mobster and neither do his wife, Kelly Preston, or Spencer Lofranco or most of the actors playing the mobsters. The only actors who turn in decent performances are Stacy Keach and Pruitt Taylor Vince, who plays Gotti’s best friend, Angelo, as they are the only actors that play the characters as real people.

Other than Keach and Vince, don’t bother with this movie. It is not only an awful movie but definitely the worst movie of 2018.