Gotti (2018)

We have classic mob films..as portrayed, hard to understand how some fat ignorant cliches are criminal masterminds. I love Travolta..i guess...but the shameless ref to pulp fiction?..with the surf guitar.The weird religion. Personal hype....it adds up, people are not as stupid as you believe.I am Riveted watching Sopranos or Godfather... but this is self indulgent nonsense.

While I wouldn't see this again, this is far from a bad movie. The two biggest problems it has is that it drags on at only 100 minutes, and it doesn't introduce many of the characters well. I'm familiar with the story of John Gotti, and how he was a criminal, yet had people in the community that adored him, the same happened with Whitey Bulger. While I can see the problem people can have with showing someone so bad in a positive light, I also don't really care. I saw the beating this got from critics, and decided to see it for myself. It's OK, John Travolta is very good here, and I liked the attention to detail, but there are better alternatives out there.Problem one is that the pacing is weird. It shows a lot in just 100 minutes, perhaps too much. It shows the death of his son, multiple trials, the murder of Paul Castellano, multiple murders in fact, and yet it still drags on. Had it been edited better, had music cues, (or any licensed music at all), it would've been fine. It also jumps around a lot, from 1975 to 1999 to 1985, without any real connection other than Gotti himself.The second major problem is that the characters aren't introduced well. It has Gotti, Neil Dellacroce, Paul Castellano, but it doesn't introduce Castellano until he's killed. In fact, Castellano has no lines of dialogue. That's a huge problem, because Castellano is almost as important to the story as Gotti himself. His promotion over Dellacroce caused a huge rift in the Gambino family, but aside from a couple lines of dialouge between Gotti and Neil, it's just passed over. I did like the scene where Paul is executed though, very well reenacted. The other characters in the movie are there, but none of them are introduced properly. They're just there, they have names, but with the amount of people in movies like this, without a good introduction, they just blend into the background.There's a great movie here somewhere, just a few minor tweaks and it would've been better. I can appriciate Travolta's dedication, as it was a big passion project for him, and he is the best part of the movie, but it could've been better than this. I recommend watching a documentary on Gotti instead of this. There are episodes of "Mobsters" on him and Castellano that are very good, watch those instead of this.

As a fan of Travolta, I thought I'd give this a go. I was riveted from start to end. A solid film with a genuine portrayal of "the life" Always been interested by the loyalty & belief that they can have two families. Based on real life, you do start to think though, how did he get away with things for so long?? Travolta really did bring the "Teflon Don" to life & to his death. Really enjoyed this film.

It's bad enough this film took four directors, 44 producers and eight years to make, but then adding actor Kevin Connolly turned novice director, and two novice screenwriters made this film unbearable.The writing was a hack job and all over the place and the director clearly had issues directing his all-star cast, not to mention his poor choice of camera angles and annoying zoom in's that seemed to be filmed by a 10 year old with a 1990's HandyCam. The story itself was however very interesting and Travolta and the rest of the cast did the best they could with the convoluted mess the novice film-makers handed them.It's a very generous 6/10 from me.