The Real Reasons Gotti Has A 0% On Rotten Tomatoes

The first fault Gotti makes obvious to the viewer is the one that sticks with you the longest after you've left the theater: The movie is incomprehensible. On a scene-to-scene basis, the editing fails in every way to tell a story in any kind of effective manner. 

As an illustrative example of shoddy editing, the initial six scenes of the movie take place in six discrete time periods, jumping all throughout the life (and afterlife) of John Gotti with what feels like complete randomness. He enters prison with no context, he leaves prison with no context. This continues throughout the film. 

The chaotic storytelling is threaded together by randomly deployed voiceover from Travolta, as well as archival news footage to serve as de facto narration that explains the plot. While these intrusions are ever-present, they never even come close to being enough to help the movie make sense. 

The only way to get anything out of the movie's story is go go directly from the theater to John Gotti's Wikipedia page. There, you will find a compelling story, arranged in order, containing adequate context and edited for clarity. And then you will regard your $10 movie ticket stub and feel decidedly hoodwinked — because Wikipedia, of course, is free.

The problems with Gotti begin with its screenplay and branch out from there. Instead of taking a traditional, time-tested approach, chronicling the rise and fall of a protagonist from point A to point Z, the story gets a little crazy with its structure.

The movie begins in a sort of purgatory, with Travolta's Gotti looking wistfully out over New York City and thinking back on his life. But instead of taking us back to the beginning, the movie leaps around at random, intercutting Gotti's early kills as an aspiring leader with his final days as an incarcerated, cancer-stricken old man. 

Flashbacks nest inside of other flashbacks, with the future and past being made to mingle together meaninglessly. The result is a movie that has no narrative thrust, just a procession of scenes, with an overall story that never reaches any sort of climax.

One of the most common story frameworks for a movie is the three-act structure, which splits a story into three discrete sections: a setup, a confrontation, and a resolution. Gotti skips the setup and starts with resolution, never introducing a compelling confrontation; the government just keeps trying to catch Gotti, until eventually they do. Afterwards, the story abruptly shifts to Gotti's son, who gets to finish off the film with his own miniature adventure. It makes for a movie that feels overlong and aimless. It's not transporting — it's a chore.

Gotti is the third film to be helmed by Kevin Connolly, best known for playing the role of Eric "E" Murphy on HBO's Entourage. To put it bluntly, it isn't a good showcase for the filmmaker's talent.

The movie is characterized by very simple direction, with many scenes blandly showing actors speaking to each other in shot/reverse shot. It seems unfair to compare this movie to Scorsese again, but the subject invites such comparisons. Goodfellas, for instance, used a famous, ambitious long take to demonstrate the power and influence of protagonist Henry Hill, with Hill and his date moving effortlessly through the back passageways of a bustling restaurant. The sequence tells a story by the way it's constructed, and nothing in Gotti even comes close to that level of filmmaking flair. The movie is flat, its blocking dull, made with an ambition that never visibly rises above getting the actors in frame and pressing "record."

The end result makes Connolly appear to be in over his head in every way. The movie makes you want to go and rewatch Entourage, just so you can see him up on screen doing what he does best — which is to say literally anything else.

Contributing to the sense of confusion that Gotti cultivates is its specific problem with establishing characters or scenes. The viewer will very quickly be forced to give up on keeping track of the sprawling cast of New York City criminal characters, who are introduced briefly, if at all. 

Sometimes names of characters, locations and time periods are established via onscreen text or dialogue, and sometimes they're not, with the identification of the movie's faces and places being deployed seemingly at random. It ends up feeling like the movie was edited in a rush over the course of a weekend, with vital information about who we're watching and where they are slapped desperately over the footage in the hopes of helping the audience keep up. It never works. The result is a movie that is borderline impossible to follow, with a story beneath the surface that just isn't anywhere close to being worth the effort. 

Another major problem that stems from the use of archival news footage to further the plot and establish the setting is the fact that none of the actors look anything like the actual characters they're playing. 

In many movies, this lack of resemblance between a performer and the person they're portraying is just the cost of doing business, and something you can suspend your disbelief for. Josh Brolin doesn't really look like George W. Bush, Rami Malek doesn't really look like Freddie Mercury, and pretty much no one who's played Richard Nixon has managed to look like the real man. This is not the sort of thing that sinks a movie — usually.

Gotti commits an unforced error by threading real news footage and photography of the people being portrayed throughout the movie, intercutting images of the real people alongside the actors trying to play them. All it does is serve to highlight just how different everyone looks from the people they're portraying, leading to confusion as you try and puzzle out who's supposed to be playing who. It's a move that heightens the movie's sense of unreality, taking any shot at verisimilitude and smothering it before your eyes.

Where there's smoke, there's often fire, and Gotti was positively smoldering by the time it hit theaters. The 0% Rotten Tomatoes rating didn't come as a surprise, with the movie's reputation as a stinker having long preceded it. But instead of elegantly taking the loss, the producers behind Gotti launched an unorthodox, divisive marketing campaign meant to discredit critics, claiming audiences loved the movie despite the assassination attempts of the movie-reviewing press. 

The problem with that line of thinking is that it appears to be untrue.

As pointed out by Screen Junkies' Dan Murrell and others, a literally unbelievable number of users on Rotten Tomatoes have left positive reviews for the movie. While the site has since verified that these reviews weren't made by robots, the exaggerated number of reviews clearly suggests a concentrated campaign to raise the audience score. (Interestingly, the exact same thing appears to have happened with American Animals — the only other release Moviepass has invested in.)

Additionally, according to Deadline, a significant number of tickets for Gotti appear to have been bought by the producers themselves. Altogether, the evidence makes a convincing case that Gotti isn't an unfairly maligned movie for the masses. In actuality, the whole thing seems to be a total racket.