Review #1,390: 'Gotti' (2018)

If you've ever seen 2015's Entourage, you'll likely recall a scene in which Jeremy Piven's super-agent Ari Gold sits down to watch the directorial debut of movie superstar Vincent Chase. He sits clenching his teeth because he knows it's going to be awful, and when we get to see a snippet of Chase's garish futuristic monstrosity, we know it to. Only in this consequence-free world of naked ladies and supercars, the film is actually a masterpiece. You get a similar feeling when watching Gotti, the biopic of the Teflon Don directed by Entourage star Kevin Connolly. One can picture Connolly, surrounded by his boys, viewing the final cut in the editing room for the first time and high-fiving his entourage bros with a sense of clueless triumph. Gotti is an utter travesty, a half-baked film student's daydream seen through a haze of weed smoke which loosely throws together a few lines they might remember from Gotti's Wikipedia page.

John Travolta plays John Gotti, and with a decent script and a competent director behind him, this may have been one of the roles of his career. Instead, we get a sluggish performance that barely skims the surface of one of the most notorious and powerful figures in mafia history. We meet him grey and in jail, taking in a visit from his son John Jr. (Spencer Rocco Lofranco), whose book the film is based on. Jr., a made man himself, wants to take a plea deal offered by the police, but rolling over for the government is as despicable as being a rat in the old man's books. This offers John Sr. the chance to reflect on his life and decisions, so the film jumps back in time to remind us how Gotti rose from gangster soldier to the boss of bosses. Only Connolly isn't interested in telling a coherent story, choosing instead to throw in a bunch of seemingly random moments you may expect to be reconstructed on a Discovery Channel documentary. There's a mob hit here, a domestic argument there, and every now and then Gotti will say something to his son about respect and manhood.

I'm not particularly fond of biopics as it goes, but I can't recall ever leaving a film feeling like I know even less about its subject matter than I did when I came in. Rather than peeling away Gotti's layers to understand what motivated the man behind the dapper suits, Connolly stages scene after scene of unconnected action and wiseguy rambling, like a man raised on the work of Martin Scorsese and who may have seen The Sopranos at some point in his life, but without a grasp on what made those works of art so absorbing. If this isn't bad enough, Gotti is peppered with a near-constant soundtrack of songs apparently plucked out of the air. An over-reliance on music is always a telltale sign of a director without vision, but it's especially grating here, with everything from Dean Martin to Duran Duran to Pitbull thrown in for good measure. It ends with real footage of Gotti's funeral in 2002, intercut with regular folk beaming about how good the gangster was for the community. He may have been just that, only we wouldn't know it from this film. After almost 2 hours of brooding, murder and terrible parenting, these final moments only leave a bad taste in the mouth. We may someday get a good movie about John Gotti, but for now we'd be better served watching Jim Abrahams' Mafia!.


Directed by: Kevin Connolly
Starring: John Travolta, Spencer Rocco Lofranco, Kelly Preston, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Stacy Keach
Country: Canada/USA

Rating: *

Tom Gillespie