Title – House of Gucci (2021)

Director – Ridley Scott (Gladiator) 

Cast – Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Al Pacino, Jared Leto, Jeremy Irons, Jack Huston 

Plot – Explores the volatile battle behind the Gucci brand as the family welcomes in Patrizia Reggiani (Gaga) after she marries Maurizio Gucci (Driver), with the two harboring ambitions to take the famous company into a bold new direction. 

“Quality is remembered long after price is forgotten”

Review by Eddie on 08/02/2022

In 2021 legendary British director Ridley Scott made a great drama starring Adam Driver and it wasn’t called House of Gucci. 

Releasing mere months on from his unfortunate box office dud The Last Duel, easily one of Scott’s best films in decades, Gucci appeared on paper to be a likely heavy hitting Oscar contender and while it’s likely to receive some Oscar spotlight thanks to its best asset Lady Gaga’s solid turn as Patrizia Reggiani, Gucci is a dull and lifeless dialogue driven family drama based around true life events that occurred in the famous Gucci family in the 1980’s. 

With its loaded based on reality plot and a name brand cast that many prestigious dramas would kill to get, Gucci should’ve been something special when one considers that talent in front of and behind the camera but this often tiresome two and a half hour epic (that really didn’t need to be as long as it was when delivered this way) struggles to provide its audience with a single special element as it follows Reggiani and her new husband Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver in one of his more mid-tier leading turns) through their ups and downs as Gucci heirs. 

Feeling like nothing more than a procession of endless scenes with actors chewing on dialogue, none more so than a Razzie worthy prosthetic clad Jared Leto who appears to have arrived to the set thinking his in an entirely different film, as his over the top Paolo Gucci waltzes around clambering for attention, Gucci has no heart or soul within its cold delivery that extends to Scott’s workmanlike direction that’s content in just being there rather than creating any type of cinematic magic or spark. 

As the man in charge, much blame for Gucci’s dry delivery and unexciting procedural nature falls at the feet of Scott who showed so recently with The Last Duel that his still capable after all these years in the industry of making features like the best of them can, making this forgettable and perhaps too self-assured outing all the more disappointing when one ponders just what may’ve been had all the ingredients here come together in the way all film fans would’ve hoped for them to do. 

Final Say – 

Outside of Lady Gaga an A-list cast can’t breathe life into a laborious and unimaginative drama based around some fascinating true life characters. With a distracting Jared Leto only making matters worse, House of Gucci is a big step backwards for Scott after the effort he made with The Last Duel. 

2 scarves out of 5