Gotti

Travolta clearly put in great effort to play John Gotti, but he's stuck in an incomprehensible mess of a movie that was shot like a clueless knockoff of a Martin Scorsese gangster epic. Many characters in Gotti are briefly introduced via titles on the screen, and the movie clumsily blunders ahead as if viewers have retained everything; there are no visual cues to keep track of anything. Francis Coppola's Godfather movies brilliantly juggled many characters who were easily identifiable. Almost every scene in Gotti consists of actors sitting in dimly lit rooms and discussing other characters by first names that have little or no meaning to those watching.

The movie's occasional violent scenes are all filmed and edited exactly as we've seen them before, in better films, and accompanied, arbitrarily, by "ironic" pieces of pop music (or Christmas music, if the scene happens to be set around the holidays). This is the kind of thing Scorsese excels at, and Gotti only demonstrates why other filmmakers don't. It's basically a collection of highlights with nothing to fill in the blanks and make any of it mean anything. It's close to being a disaster; if the real Gotti knew that this was part of his legacy, people would certainly be rubbed out.