Is John Travolta’s Gotti one of the worst movies ever?

John Travolta’s long-gestating passion-project Gotti has been slated by film critics as the “worst mob movie ever”.

Eight years in the making, dogged by changes of directors, producers and cast, Gotti - finally released in the US last Friday - is currently one of a handful of films scoring 0% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.

The rock-bottom ranking puts Gotti in an “exclusive losers club that includes Jaws: The Revenge, Return to the Blue Lagoon, National Lampoon's Gold Diggers and Look Who's Talking Now!, which also starred Travolta”, says The Daily Telegraph.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The film tells the real-life story of New York mobster John Gotti, nicknamed the “Teflon Don” for successfully evading prosecution through the 1980s. He was finally convicted for a string of murders in 1992 and sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 2002.

Writing for The AV Club, Mike D’Angelo says that, for what is ostensibly the tale of one of America’s most ruthless gangsters, there is precious little action.

“Gotti avoided prison for years by buying and threatening witnesses, but these machinations barely get mentioned, much less dramatised”, he writes, dubbing the biopic “Drabfellas”.

Travolta’s performance - “channelling the Teflon Don via Tony Soprano via the Dolmio dad”, as per The Guardian’s Guy Lodge - has also come in for a kicking.

The film’s artistic flaws are not the only glaring issue, says The Hollywood Reporter’s Jordan Mintzer - its sympathetic rendering of the violent gangster is unsettling.

Yes, “the film is pretty terrible: poorly written, devoid of tension, ridiculous in spots and just plain dull in others”, but it is also “hagiographic - one could even say pro-mob” in its portrayal of Gotti.

“I’d rather wake up next to a severed horse head than ever watch ‘Gotti’ again,” claims New York Post critic Johnny Oleksinski. It’s not only “the worst movie of the year so far”, he says, but also the “worst mob movie ever”.