Gotti Review: Travolta’s Best Role For Years

A quick search of the movie Gotti on Google brings up some ugly results. Terrible reviews, 0% score on Rotten Tomatoes, every critic in the land trashing the movie. I took this in my stride as usually, these bent up outta shape critics completely trash films that end up being easily watchable. Thank god I’m not a critic! Take a Xanax or something, gees.

I can watch the biggest pile of crap and usually find something positive about it and after watching the trailer for the movie and reading a vast array of opinion I was sure that I could salvage something within Gotti that would impress me. The trailer was impressive and I almost never agree with the majority of ‘critic’ opinion. By the time the credits rolled I was chuckling to myself for not believing the trash that was written about this film.

Gotti certainly isn’t great but Travolta’s performance takes this movie out from the gutter in easily his finest role in recent years and the film as a whole is thoroughly enjoyable at a surface level.

Gotti is a biopic of the notorious New York crime boss John Gotti. The film should chronicle his life as a whole but we’re catapulted into the early 70’s (Gotti was born in 1930) without so much as an overlook about his upbringing or anything of that matter.

We’re straight into the thick of things as Gotti is rising up through the ranks. The movie doesn’t particularly explore much of what a biopic typically covers. Gotti instead chooses to explore the relationship between John and his son, John Gotti Jnr (Spencer Lofranco).

Facts are few and far between within the movie and a lot is crammed into such a small space. We don’t really get a character arc in terms of the story being told here, the film stands as more of a statement or reassurance that this guy meant business and was a man to be feared. Footage from real-life newscasts is splattered around the film including real news footage of his funeral in 2002.

This bouncing back and forth gets a little frustrating but put aside these little blips and we have Travolta commanding every scene.

I can’t help but feel with a bit more direction and with more depth of script that this film could have been something truly incredible. Travolta commanded the screen, a truly outstanding performance that overshadows everything else we see before us. It was a role he was born to play.

Directed by Kevin Connolly (Entourage) and written by Lem Dobbs and Leo Rossi, Gotti paints a more sympathetic angle towards Gotti as a person, a husband and a provider with some moments of mobster insanity, shoot-outs and hits ordered on particular gang members here and there.

The film tends to turn a blind eye to the bad (as a whole) and focus on more of Gotti as a man who was cleaning the streets of evil. Someone who provided not just for his family but for the local community. A strange angle indeed but then again my knowledge of the real-life John Gotti is zero.

If a film is so terrible. I have no hesitation in turning it off instantly and writing as such on this very site. But Gotti kept me hooked from start to finish. Film reviews will always be subjective as everyone has their own individual tastes but I can’t for the life of me think of why anyone would give this a 0 or 1 out of 5-stars review.

The film has much more to offer and despite its flaws, it shines through as a rather intriguing, bloody and fascinating piece.

This is a movie for the fans. F**Kcritics! This is for the fans of mobster epics, this is for the fans of those hard-hitting full throttle masculine movies that just grit their teeth and get on with shit.

Take out exceptions such as 12 Years a Slave, Slumdog Millionaire and Moonlight and Gotti is better than most of the last decade of Oscar best picture winners. How’s that for controversy?

But who knows, maybe I just gave this movie a good review out of fear of getting ‘whacked’. I guess you’ll just never know.