{"id":28377,"date":"2018-07-02T02:45:03","date_gmt":"2018-07-02T06:45:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=28377"},"modified":"2018-07-02T02:52:47","modified_gmt":"2018-07-02T06:52:47","slug":"gotti-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2018\/07\/02\/gotti-2018\/","title":{"rendered":"Gotti (2018)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>If anything, \u201cGotti\u201d will go down as one of the most infamous movies of 2018. It\u2019s a movie was in development hell for years, snuck up on audiences, and garnered a ton of bad reviews. And it responded by insulting critics and talking down to its audience. Make no mistake though, \u201cGotti\u201d is bad. It\u2019s very bad. It\u2019s pure Oscar bait, with a director who realty wants his film to be \u201cGoodfellas,\u201d and a leading star who is so completely out of his lane it\u2019s kind of sad to watch. Here John Travolta doesn\u2019t seem to be acting, so much as competing for an Oscar nod, and it\u2019s an endurance test from beginning to end.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

John Travolta plays John Gotti, the iconic mob boss, and so confident is director Kevin Connolly in his star, that he allows Travolta to play the man in all stages of his life. From a young up and coming criminal, to an old man suffering from cancer, Travolta is always covered in make up, and never quite pulls off a convincing performance. Director Connolly jumps from time period to time period, first with awkward book ended narration that breaks the fourth wall, and then by skipping from Gotti as a young man, to Gotti as an old man, to Gotti as a family man. It\u2019s all so confusing and muddled that you\u2019ll spend more time trying to make sense of the movie, than appreciating the emotional weight of a man who lost his son to a horrible car accident.<\/p>\n

Travolta (whose turn feels less like an aged Gotti and more like an aged Vinnie Barbarino if he\u2019d turned to a life of crime after his time with the Sweathogs) is hopelessly stuck in a movie that is confusing, painfully dull, and dabbles in camp so often that it\u2019s impossible not to chuckle at least once. Travolta goes all out donning prosthetics, and wigs, and weird contact lenses and never does anything with them. Instead he just trots out a really bad \u201cNoo Yawkah\u201d accent and expects the rest to fill itself in. Truth be told, Travolta performs like he\u2019s acting in a mid-week dinner theater production during a lull in attendance. This is a man who should have evolved by now with better roles, but he just keeps falling in to these cinematic pieces of junk that seem more motivated to be thought of as vehicles, and less as works that challenge its star.<\/p>\n

To make matters worse, \u201cGotti\u201d inexplicably transforms in to surreal a vanity project with Travolta\u2019s wife Kelly Preston chewing the scenery as Gotti\u2019s long suffering wife, with an equally awful Noo Yawkah accent. Pruitt Taylor Vincent, who is typically a strong character actor, even suffers with a sub-par turn as Gotti\u2019s right hand man Angelo. In the end, \u201cGotti\u201d is more a series of small poorly directed episodes in the life of John Gotti, and less a chronicle of the rise and fall of the Teflon Don. In a few years I imagine movie fans will at least appreciate it as a camp classic in the tradition of \u201cMommy Dearest.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If anything, \u201cGotti\u201d will go down as one of the most infamous movies of 2018. It\u2019s a movie was in development hell for years, snuck up on audiences, and garnered a ton of bad reviews. And it responded by insulting critics and talking down to its audience. Make no mistake though, \u201cGotti\u201d is bad. It\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[64,138,240,302,391,558,1246,1087],"class_list":["post-28377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-adaptation","tag-biography","tag-crime","tag-drama","tag-gangster","tag-john-travolta","tag-mobster","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28377"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28377\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28380,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28377\/revisions\/28380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}