Disclaimer: The views expressed here are mine alone and do not represent those of allgames.com.
Introduction To the Gotti Movie Review by Ms. H
I was searching online for new movies and came across the Gotti movie starring John Travolta that showed a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 0%. I couldn’t believe that this movie got a 0%. If you follow my movie reviews, you probably know that I am not influenced by other people's opinions. I watch the movie and come to my own conclusions about a movie. However, after seeing that 0% score, I just had to see the movie for myself and see if the movie was good, bad or indifferent.
Since the specific day I went to see Gotti was the last day that it would be shown at that particular theater, I watched two movies in one night. -- Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and Gotti. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom ended in time for me to go back to the ticket counter, redeem my free movie ticket and then reenter the movie theater to see Gotti. By the way, I earned a free movie with my movie rewards points-- outside of MoviePass. Was this movie worth my time? Check out my movie review and find out.
Storyline of the Gotti Movie
I’ve seen crime movies in the past, so I expected to see plenty of court appearance scenes, and so forth. This movie seemed to focus on Gotti grooming his son to take over -- even while Gotti was constantly in the courtroom with lawyers. The movie showed a few cases where he won; but on the ones that he lost -- he lost big.
Acting Abilities of the Actors in the Gotti Movie
For the most part, I think the actors performed adequately in their roles. I expected to see more emotion from John Travolta, who as I mentioned previously starred as Gotti. There were a few scenes, but not many to let the audience know what was going on in the head of John Gotti. I think the best actor in the movie was Spencer Lofranco who played the son of John Gotti and the worst actor was Kelly Preston who played the part of Gotti’s wife, Victoria. In my opinion she delivered her lines emotionless and was unbelievable to me in this role.
Director Skills Needed to Improve in the Gotti Movie
I think this movie suffered mainly from poor directing and maybe editing -- instead of bad acting. For example, during the bar scene fight, It was obvious to me that the fighting was not being performed by capable actors or stunt people. I even saw a man just hit out in the air -- with noone close enough for him to land a punch. From then on, the direction seemed to go downhill -- depending on the movie scene.
Regarding John Travolta’s acting -- instead of concentrating on delivering his lines, he seemed intent on trying to emulate the position of Gotti’s lower face -- which came across as being contrived.
There was also a poor choice of songs during the movie for many of the acting scenes. For instance, the screen would show a certain year the action was taking place, e.g., 1988, and in the background you would hear current rap songs that did not match the scene.
The above being said, I think the worst directing of this movie occurred when there were flashbacks where actual footage from television news shows appeared. Many times, the scene would change from a clear focused one (the present) to one of fuzziness (the past) because of the flashback of an event that happened on TV in the 1980’s. There was no transition between these scenes to alert you that you are now looking at a flashback instead of the current scene in the movie.
There was also poor transitioning during some of the dialogue. If someone was telling a story and mentioned a street name -- during the flashback, the camera would show the street sign of that particular street right after the name was mentioned -- and then the action would follow. I found this to look amateurish on the part of the director.
Assessment of the Gotti Movie
All was not lost with the Gotti movie. Even though I did not like watching the violence throughout the movie, a plus for the movie is that it is relatively short, there are no overtly gruesome scenes in the movie and it was a simple, straight-forward story. I was expecting to see far worse than what I saw. The major problem as stated above was the directing in the movie vice the acting. Since the movie was free, I did not feel as if I wasted my time. Bottom line, the movie Gotti was just a movie biopic on John Gotti -- a movie that was in no way spectacular but was also not extraordinarily bad.
Rating of the Gotti Movie
Based on a rating of 1 star to 5 stars with 5 stars being the highest, I rate Gotti 2 stars.