Title – Gotti (2018)

Director – Kevin Connolly (Dear Eleanor)

Cast – John Travolta, Spencer Rocco Lofranco, Kelly Preston, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Stacy Keach

Plot – Tells the true story of crime boss and renowned mob figure John Gotti (Travolta), from his rise up the criminal ranks to his incarceration.

“Do you know what you’re doing to this family?”

Review by Eddie on 20/12/2018

I’m not sure how you make the life of famous New York crime figure John Gotti into a boring and borderline incoherent feature film, but low and behold Kevin Connolly (aka Eric Murphy from hit TV show Entourage) has, with the help of his lead actor John Travolta and a terribly focussed narrative, done just that.

A $10 million dollar production that failed to recreate even half of those costs in its cinematic run earlier this year, that also featured a notorious 0% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes from film critics, Gotti feels like a film that’s not too dissimilar from a student film thanks to its shoddily edited proceedings, trite dialogue (that wants to be Goodfella’s cool but doesn’t come close) and a collection of lifeless and charmless performances.

Acting like a collection of Gotti’s Greatest Hits as we follow Travolta from a young up-start of the New York crime scene into a fully-fledged head of the family, Connolly struggles to find a pace and place to bring the notorious character to life as the narrative fly’s between timelines, that make the film almost impossible to follow and filled with side-characters we barely get to know or care for as time wears on.

It’s a hurdle the film was never going to overcome and when you add in shoddy camerawork by DOP Michael Barrett, poor editing from Jim Flynn and the years worst film score by Pitbull (yes the “Kodak” Pitbull), you begin to understand why not a single critic found a redeeming element to Connolly and Travolta’s vanity project.

In the doldrums for a number of years now, this is a new low-point for Travolta who acts a lot with his hands here to make up for his weak dialogue and it finally appears as though the distant memory of career rejuvenator Pulp Fiction is but that, a faded memory of an actor who once made top class film’s.

It’s a sad site watching Travolta fumble through the film here, in what he may have seen as an opportunity to bring cool to the Gotti storyline ends up being more like an embarrassing and charmless offering, Gotti acting as a shell of an actor that once could light up a screen.

Final Say –

Gotti may not be the “worst” film released this year but it’s quite possibly the most lifeless and lethargic. A frighteningly generic and amateurish production, Gotti is the worst type of true crime film, one that’s nothing more than laborious to endure.

1 fireworks display out of 5