Mark Reviews Movies: GOTTI

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 14, 2018

The life story of John Gotti, the infamous mafia boss from Queens, is kind of told in Gotti. There's not really a story here. It's more a series of recognizable scenes from any number of gangster movies—the politicking, the conspiring, the talks about honor, the home life, the courtroom drama, the killings. These are strung together with little rhyme and even less reason, as the mafia don "makes his bones," is dying in prison, orchestrates a coup against the current family boss, and tries to convince his eldest son that the kid should fight against a system that has it out for him.

Lem Dobbs and Leo Rossi's screenplay goes back and forth in time, beginning with a dead Gotti (played by John Travolta in a decent, if broad, performance) standing in front of the Queensboro Bridge and talking to the camera to tell us a bit about himself. From there, it's all a jumble, and we start to suspect that maybe the movie's structure was cobbled together in the editing room by director Kevin Connolly, under the false belief that a story that plays the past against the present is inherently more significant.

Surely, it can be, but for that to happen, there has to be a dramatic or thematic rationale behind it. This movie exists with little drama and a strangely defensive theme, so in this case, the structure just comes across as a mess.

There are, perhaps, three separate timelines occurring in alternating fashion here. The first tells the story of Gotti's rise within the Gambino crime family in a fairly straightforward way. The second has an ill Gotti, suffering from three types of cancer, telling his son John Jr. (Spencer Lofranco), whose physical appearance doesn't change from being a teenager to being an adult (except for some glasses), the case against taking a plea deal with the government for the son's own criminal charges. The third occurs at some point in between, as Gotti goes to trial on a long list of charges, including five counts of murder, that would land him in prison for the rest of his life. The only connective tissue between these scenes is that these things happened.

We meet an assortment of characters through Gotti's rise in the 1970s and '80s, with the names of these figures appearing below the characters as other characters name them in the dialogue. The redundancy is unhelpful, since the movie has little concern with the characters or the politics behind Gotti's eventual grab for power.

Only a few are important, namely Neil Dellacroce (Stacy Keach), the guy who runs the business while the real boss sits in a mansion away from the streets, and Angelo Ruggiero (Pruitt Taylor Vince), the unwitting target of some clandestine recordings who's like a brother to Gotti. Everyone else is here as a generic participant in a string of generic scenes—be it Gotti scolding a potential rat or some goon plotting a rival's assassination.

Other scenes include assorted trials for crimes that the movie leaves unspecified, the death of one of Gotti's younger sons in an accident (The movie presents the retribution for that with an almost comedic tone, for some reason), and other moments at home, as John Jr. decides to go into his father's line of work, much to the chagrin of Gotti's wife Victoria (Kelly Preston). Without any the filmmakers providing sense of background or explanation, people are tried and convicted, murders occur, the son gets married, and Gotti becomes the boss.

We don't learn anything specific about the man or his way of life. The movie apparently expects that we know, not Gotti's particular story necessarily, but the general thrust of such tales of crime. It's built on such expectations, figuring that we'll understand how and why these killings happen (A single, loaded look serves as the go-ahead order), recognize that there's more to Gotti than his crimes because he sobs alone about his dead son, and even sympathize with the guy because he lives by a code.

To say the movie reveres Gotti is almost an understatement. It doesn't matter what he did, whom he may have killed or ordered to be killed, or how he got his own son tied up in this life (After showing us just how involved the son is in the family business, the movie actually has the audacity to suggest that he's innocent). Gotti ends by framing the man as a local hero, who kept the streets safe and only killed those like him. That's one way of looking at him, I guess.

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