Director: Kevin Connolly
Year: 2018
Rated R
Rating: * 1/2 Stars
Cast: John Travolta, Kelly Preston, Stacy Keach
What's-a-matter with the flick I'm about to review? Uh plenty. Gotti is a skewed, timeline misfire. It features star John Travolta hamming it up, talking into the lens a la Ray Liotta, and sporting yet another fake hairpiece. As far as new releases go in 2018, Gotti tries way too hard to appeal to everyone's gangster sensibilities. Despite decent supporting work from an unrecognizable Kelly Preston (Travolta's actual spouse) and veteran character actor Pruitt Taylor Vance, Gotti is sadly pretty "spotty".
Note to Gotti's director Kevin Connolly and his whole freaking crew (no pun intended): Francis Ford Coppola called and says he wants all his mob cliches and cliched Italian names back. Also, Martin Scorsese phoned in. He doesn't want you to include the ditty "House of the Rising Sun" and says that famed editor Thelma Schoonmaker is unavailable to step in for a fixing. Finally, don't make an organized crime pic that lacks a sense of foreboding or real danger. It just renders the proceedings laughable and sadly irrelevant.
Anyway, Gotti sloppily chronicles the thirty-year monarchy of Gambino crime boss John Joseph Gotti Jr. (Travolta harbors a lot of parody-style rage here in the lead role). In truth, this film is never boring as its inconsistent soundtrack of Pitbull and 70's/80's tunage litters every frame. Still, Gotti leaves the viewer adrift with too many characters, screw loose editing, dead end plot threads, and numerous TV movie interludes.
So OK, helmer Connolly knows what to do with the camera. His storytelling sensibilities, well that's a different matter altogether. Kevin shoots everything in skewed, prearranged fashion with scene after scene completely jotting back and forth. He fashions Gotti as a second-tier Black Mass, using every borough in NYC as a setting and literally butchering the almighty cinematic form.
Remember when Kevin Connolly starred in Entourage and tried to produce its fictional, box office bomb Medellin? Well talk about art imitating indelible, real-life. Gotti with its eye-rolling, tough talking script and severe whiff of incoherence, gets a 1.5 star rating from me.
Written by Jesse Burleson
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