John Travolta’s ‘Gotti’ gets rare zero per cent score
LOS ANGELES: John Travolta’s new film, ‘Gotti’, a biopic about the late mobster John Gotti has earned a rare distinction — a zero per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the movie review site.
To date, the film had collected just 13 reviews and all 13 are considered “rotten.”
Travolta is no stranger to that dubious notoriety, though. Wikipedia’s list of movies with a zero per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes includes his 1983 film, Staying Alive, and his 1993 film, Look Who’s Talking Now.
Reviewing the film for The New York Times, critic Glenn Kenny wrote, “That the long-gestating crime drama ‘Gotti’ is a dismal mess comes as no surprise. What does shock is just how multifaceted a dismal mess it is.”
Jordan Mintzer’s assessment for The Hollywood Reporter cautioned, “The film is pretty terrible: poorly written, devoid of tension, ridiculous in spots and just plain dull in others.”
On the Metacritic review site, which measures critics’ judgments with a numerical grade, ‘Gotti’, based on five reviews, has currently earned a 27 out of a possible 100.
‘Gotti’, debuting in 503 cinemas in North America this weekend, has taken more than seven years to reach the screen. The Rrated drama is expected to gross between US$1 million and US$2 million during its first three days.
Moviegoers were more generous than the critics in their responses, with Rotten Tomatoes reporting that 80 per cent of moviegoers rated the movie positively.
Since first being announced in 2011, the project has gone through a quartet of directors; its IMDb page lists 44 producers, executive producers and co-producers; and just this past December, its future appeared in doubt when distributor Lionsgate Premiere pulled it from the release schedule just 10 days before the movie was to hit cinemas.
But Keya Morgan, an executive producer on the film that played a role in buying rights back from Lionsgate, promises the wait will be worth it. “It’s a masterpiece. It’s one of the best mob movies I’ve seen in years,” he told The Hollywood Reporter.