Or: “How to Whack a Movie in Broad Daylight”
Leave the Cannoli, Take the Shame
Gotti (2018) is like being told a bedtime story by a guy who’s had ten Red Bulls, watched Goodfellas once on TNT, and thinks “RICO” is a guy he met at the deli. Directed by Kevin Connolly—yes, E from Entourage—and starring John Travolta in the title role, Gotti aspires to be a gritty crime saga and ends up feeling like a long, awkward dinner with someone doing a bad Joe Pesci impression while wearing a Halloween wig.
This is a movie that opens with Travolta breaking the fourth wall to tell us, “This life ends one of two ways: dead or in jail. I did both.” Which would be fine… if the movie didn’t proceed to prove he also died a third way—on screen, smothered by exposition and Aqua Net.
A Crime Against Cinema
Biopics are tricky. Especially when the subject is one of the most notorious mob bosses in American history. What you don’t do is shoot the movie like a Mafia TikTok. The timeline jumps around more than a paranoid bookie. One minute we’re in the 1970s, the next we’re at a funeral in the ’90s, then suddenly Gotti’s walking a dog, and none of it is in service of anything resembling narrative structure.
It’s like the editor spilled the film reels on the floor, shrugged, and said, “Eh, this’ll do.”
And then there’s the script—if you can call it that. It reads like a Wikipedia article dictated by someone doing shots. Dialogue exists primarily to let people say each other’s full names and state the year out loud. “It’s 1986, Johnny!” “Frankie Decicco’s car exploded in Brooklyn!” “Paul Castellano is dead!” Yes, thank you. We got it.
Travolta’s Wigs and Other War Crimes
John Travolta plays John Gotti as a man who is equal parts mob boss and malfunctioning animatronic from a wax museum. His accent is a ping-pong game between Staten Island, Florida, and wherever Grease took place. He’s not bad, exactly—he’s just in a completely different movie. Like Face/Off meets My Cousin Vinny. And his hair? It deserves its own IMDb page. It changes color and texture so often, it might be in witness protection.
There’s a scene—an actual scene—where Gotti dances with his wife to Pitbull’s “Amore.” Let that sink in. John Travolta. Dressed like a Mafia Teletubby. Slow dancing to Pitbull. This isn’t mob royalty. It’s a SNL sketch that refuses to end.
The Family Business (Also a Disaster)
Kelly Preston plays Gotti’s long-suffering wife, Victoria, with the quiet desperation of a woman who knows this movie’s going straight to VOD. Spencer Rocco Lofranco, who plays John Gotti Jr., narrates the film like a high school dropout giving an oral report on a mob documentary he barely skimmed.
The film tries to sell the idea that the Gotti family were loyal, misunderstood Robin Hoods who loved their neighborhood. But between the soundtrack (a mash-up of EDM, doo-wop, and public domain mobster music), the pacing (think molasses on a cold day), and the forced narration, it ends up feeling less like a tribute and more like a PR campaign for a guy who died in prison.
What Movie Were They Making?
It’s clear Connolly wanted to make The Godfather meets The Sopranos. What we got was Mobster Movie Mad Libs, with all the drama of a meatball sub and half the tension. Characters are introduced and disappear with zero context. Conflicts are resolved off-screen. Assassinations happen with all the gravity of a deleted scene from Sharknado 4.
Even the violence is confused—gunshots with no weight, blood that looks like ketchup left in the sun. And just when you think it might ramp up, it cuts to Gotti Jr. squinting into the middle distance like he’s thinking about lunch.
The Rottenest Tomato
Gotti famously scored a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. That’s not easy. That means not a single critic thought it was even “okay.” You could film a dog reading The Godfather in a Brooklyn accent and get a better rating. Hell, Battlefield Earthhas a higher score—and that movie had space dreads.
Final Verdict
0.5 out of 5 tracksuits
Gotti is a cinematic drive-by. It has no idea what story it’s telling, why it’s telling it, or how editing works. It’s all flash, no focus—a cheap suit of a movie with spaghetti stains and a gold chain it didn’t earn.
If you’re craving a real gangster film, go watch Goodfellas again. If you’re craving pain, watch Gotti. But don’t say you weren’t warned. Like the man said: dead or in jail. This movie belongs in both.
