Within days of its limited theatrical release, this John Travolta-starring John Gotti biopic was being confidently hailed as "the worst mob movie of all time." While it's hard to be 100 percent certain if that distinction's true or not, it's hard to see how things could get much worse.
Gotti's greatest sin is that it's incredibly boring. Aside from a few moments of high camp, such as Travolta's Gotti limply slap-fighting his sons over a bar-brawl homicide, there's not very much to chuckle at here. It's a movie made by people who don't know how to make movies, but it confusingly just happens to have a movie star as its lead.
Bizarrely edited and difficult to follow, the movie is essentially a long collection of technically uninteresting scenes, stitched together with voiceover and real-life archival news footage into something that only sometimes looks like a film.
If Gotti ends up being remembered at all in the future, it will likely be due only to the movie's pugilistic and manipulative marketing tactics. In an effort to combat its 0 percent favorability among critics, producers of the film rolled out an ad campaign claiming (quite spuriously) that it's not a movie for critics, but rather something general audiences would enjoy. And that's fair — if you generally don't think about movies, talk about movies, or watch movies, then sure, the movie is fine. Everyone else? Stay far away, capiche?
