Is Gotti the worst film of 2018 – or the victim of a Mafia-style hit?
“It may only be June, but we already have a runaway favourite for worst film of the year,” said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph. John Travolta’s latest offering, Gotti – a biopic of the New York mafia boss John Gotti – has flopped at the US box office and been panned by critics. One reviewer called it “the worst mob movie ever”. At the time of writing, the film has a score of 0% on the review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes. That “rare achievement” puts it among an elite band of turkeys that also includes Jaws: The Revenge, Return to the Blue Lagoon and Look Who’s Talking Now, another Travolta vehicle.
“This life ends one of two ways: dead or in jail,” intones Travolta in an over-the-top New York accent at the start of Gotti. Then he adds portentously: “I did both.” What follows is a “checklist of ingredients for box office calamity”, said Robey. To play the “Teflon Don” (so-called because of his uncanny ability to evade the law), the star sports a range of stiff and unconvincing wigs. His real-life wife, Kelly Preston, appears as his screen wife: a bit of marital nepotism of a kind that rarely bodes well in a movie. And while this is a quintessentially New York story, Gotti was for some reason filmed in Cincinnati.
In an unexpected twist, the film’s PR people have responded to the critical mauling by going on the offensive, said Alissa Wilkinson on Vox, rushing out a new advert that, interspersed with scenes from the film, accuses critics of having “put out a hit” on Gotti. “Who would you trust more?” the trailer concludes. “Yourself or a troll behind a keyboard?” British film fans may have to wait to decide: Gotti is not currently scheduled for a UK theatrical release.