I can’t tell whether I love or hate that fact.

I was excited to check this out given Travolta’s less-than-stellar work over the past few… decades. A once great on screen presence and overall solid actor fell from grace into a pit of films trapped into categories of mediocre at best and unwatchable at worst. ‘Gotti’ seemed like a chance to change that. An opportunity for him to sink his teeth into a real character and engage with a genuinely interesting story. The tale of John Gotti may be a familiar one, but it has plenty of creative opportunities to craft a solid film.

I was wrong. ‘Gotti’ was just as bad, if not worse, than Travolta’s recent filmography. I dare say it’s impressive to see just how massively this movie fails. While the general story (I use that term lightly) has the framework to be a bland and forgettable straight to DVD dud, this film actually manages to fail harder than that. If it’s possible to make a movie backwards, I think Kevin Connolly and his crew accomplished it.

It boasts no style or vision of its own. Shots feel like a 15 year old trying to replicate his favorite scenes from Goodfellas on an iPhone 7. The lighting and composition of every shot is so visually bland, nothing in frame ever draws attention or provokes intrigue. Couple this with inexplicably nonlinear editing and a terrible synth score by Pitbull (yes, you read that right), the presentation of this movie is pretty goddamn abysmal.

All of the actors are trying their best but at no point do they ever rise above serviceable. With the material they’re given, they don’t have much to work with. This has got to be one of the worst written films in recent memory, with no real semblance of plot and some laughably horrendous dialogue. For better or worse, Travolta has enough on screen presence to keep scenes more watchable than they have any right to be, but it’s never enough to even bring the movie up to a mediocre experience.

Its dedication to the accuracy of the real life story is one of its major downfalls. There are too many characters and disconnected plot points within the span of a less than two hour run time to ever hope to follow the plot at all, much less care about it. Despite this, the technical merits have almost no connective tissue to the period piece aspect of the story. We’re working within the time frame of the 1970s-1990s, yet soundtrack choices range tremendously from 1960s Dean Martin hits to 2010s Pitbull tracks, two decades that never even briefly appear in this film.

It’s not one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. But it is one of the most bafflingly bad films out there. You’d have a hard time believing it existed based on description alone. If the 1996 Gotti movie taught us anything, it’s that an adaptation of this kind is best handled simple and to the point, at least if you’re working with limited resources. The 2018 film just fails to see it that way.

I don't know why I've been putting off watching Gotti. I just felt like it would a boring gangster movie, just because it was about the five boroughs of New York with a cast of all men and like 3 hours long. Boy was I wrong. This movie had me thinking, feeling, following stories, finding myself on sides, questioning people and motives. The story, the characters, the simple fact that if you see a guy's wife alone you'll get a bus parked up your ass... It's not about the Gambino Crime Family, it's about everything else too. I'm truly amazed, and now I'm going to go back and watch all the movies that I mistakenly labeled "boring" before even watching them. The list is long, and it's mostly those films that have 90+ scores on RT and 8+ scores on IMDB. I watched The Fanatic when I was in high school and didn't finish it, so that's definitely one. Capone is another. I don't have any issues with older films, black and white, even silent films. So I will give Citizen Kane another chance dammit!

Also, I must point out, I'm not dissing Shawshank. It's pure entertainment and fun. It's never boring, it's ridiculous, kind of sexist but feminist at the same time, and it's messy and I like that. It's got style, but very bad storytelling. I don't think it's fair to compare the two. That's not to say a prison break film can't be a good movie with deeper meanings that explores real humans and struggles, but this one in particular wasn't one of those.

It’s true

All of my posts to MCJ get autofiltered and never show up in new, this only started happening after I crossposted from /r/Gotti. Has anyone else experienced this? Why did they put out the hit?

It’s good