Gotti

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Gotti is one of the most haphazardly structured movies of the year so far. It feels like they wanted to do a bunch of different wraparounds, but they couldn’t decide which one they wanted to go with, so they chose to do all of them. The movie literally opens with John Gotti (played John Travolta) talking to the audience House of Cards style. One of the opening lines of the film is something along the lines of: “In this life you either end up in jail or dead. I did both.” As far as I’m concerned, this confusing line set the tone for the mess that was about to come.  From there, it jumps between Gotti as old man (with iffy makeup on) in prison talking to his eldest son and Gotti making his way through the ranks as a middle aged man. Gotti also narrates the movie at random points. The movie also uses new broadcasts as transitions between scenes from time to time. I don’t know why. It doesn’t add anything to the movie, and wouldn’t change anything if it was removed entirely. Most of the blame for these decisions should go to director Kevin Connolly. This movie looks cheap. At no point did I ever think to myself: “this looks like it belongs in theaters.” The movie kind of just crawls along. Even the moments that are supposed to be tense are filmed in such a way that I really could never bring myself to care about anything I was watching onscreen. This movie also glosses over a lot of things. There’s a point where Gotti’s friend Angelo (played by Pruitt Taylor Vince) yells at Gotti’s son. He says: “The proudest moment of your father’s life was watching you graduate from military school.” I just thought: “Wait. What?” The acting in this film is truly awful. Almost everybody speaks with exaggerated accents. It doesn’t feel natural. It feels more like actors saying lines like how a stereotypical gangster might say a line. The one exception to this is Stacy Keach (though even he can’t necessarily make all of his dialogue work). But, the crown for awful acting has to go to John Travolta. It kind of sucks because I know Travolta can be a good actor, and I think he could have done a good job in the role of John Gotti in a much better movie. In all honestly, there are very few things about Gotti that actually work, and I have no intentions of ever watching this movie again in my life. 

1 / 10