Much maligned biopic of the gangster - whose life has probably been filmed too many times already - isn't that bad for the most part. I mean, it is, but there's some okay moments and it looks snazzy.
John Travolta tries his heart out, as he normally does - but you're always conscious of him Acting with his hair and wacky accent. The same goes for Kelly Preston. It's like two parents play acting - even if one of the sequences (the death of Gotti's 12 year old son) must have had unbearable personal resonance for them.
Like many mafia films these days it's very much in the shadow of The Godfather and especially Goodfellas. It also owes a debt to Entourage - or maybe I was just reading that into it - but some of the party scenes and the use of well known tracks felt very Entourage-y. It feels more like a movie made by someone who watches a lot of movies instead of having a genuine feel for its topic.
Like a lot of biopics it tries to pack in too much - I couldn't follow what was going on a lot of the time. Really the story should have focused on Gotti and his son. That would've been a great movie - what is it like having your dad as a mafia dude, not telling mom that you want to get into the business, how do you work your way up, etc, etc.... But the film offers a stock version of Gotti and a beyond whitewashed version of the son.
That's when this film really lost me - the last half hour or so when it became a propaganda film for Gotti Jnr. The cast an actor who looks like a little lost boy, completely whitewash any mafia involvement (we see him become a "made man" but no kidnapping or beating or anything). There's this horrendous end where we have slabs of Gotti Jnr's lawyer's testimony going on about how good he is and how the government wasted all this money going after him. And I thought the people associated with this should be ashamed of themselves.
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