[DECIDER] John Travolta’s much-maligned Gotti currently has a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Zero. To put that in perspective, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo has a 9% Tomatometer score. When I read that this critically-reviled crime drama about notorious gangster John Gotti was heading to Prime Video, I wondered if the film was “so bad it’s actually good” bad, or “so bad that it’s very, very, very, very bad” bad. It’s the latter. Oh my Gotti, it’s the latter. I don’t wanna kick a movie when it’s down, but my TYDT review of Gotti is “Buzz, your girlfriend. Woof.”Directed by Kevin Connolly and starring John Travolta, Kelly Preston, and a cacophonous train wreck of atrocious accents, Gotti is… technically a movie. What separates this project from other films is that it bravely decided to forgo anything even remotely resembling a coherent narrative. Respect, man. Respect. Watching it is kinda like your five-year-old nephew coming up to you and being like, “I drew this! And this! And this! And here’s a picture of skunk!” I never, not for one single solitary second, understood what was happening. I kinda got it in an abstract way? Attempting to comprehend Gotti is like staring at a Magic Eye picture for an hour only to be like, “Wait a minute. This isn’t a Magic Eye at all; it’s an atlas of the city of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.”
Only with more wigs and cursing.
Is Gotti so bad it’s worth hate-watching? No. Not really. Other than some truly astonishing wig and accent work, you’re not missing much. The whole thing is more puzzling than entertaining. I found myself saying “wait, what?” at almost every turn and was routinely left wondering if the entire movie was a parody or some form of advanced irony I was too dumb to understand. Gotti is either a very bad film or a work of next-level art my primitive brain can’t fully comprehend. Maybe in 2,000 years Gotti will be the new Mona Lisa? Who knows. All bets are off when it comes to this movie.
We did have some good times, Gotti and I. At one point, the film just scampers off to have a private conversation with itself, prattling on about characters that have yet to be introduced. Or maybe they were? I honestly have no idea. There’s like 1,000 gangsters in this movie. This section is either immensely poor storytelling or incredibly esoteric performance art. Either way, it lasts somewhere between thirty seconds and an hour. Time is a tugboat when it comes to Gotti. Sure, that expression doesn’t make sense, but neither does ANYTHING ELSE IN THIS MOVIE.