The Reviews Of John Travolta’s New Mob Movie Are Absolutely Fucking Brutal

It takes a special kind of movie to score a zero on Rotten Tomatoes. Jaws: The Revenge did it. Police Academy 4 did it. You better believe Baby Geniuses 2: Superbabies did it. And now, after years in development hell, the John Travolta-led mob movie Gotti has done it too.

Directed by Kevin Connolly, better known as E from Entourage (yes, really), the crime biopic about the infamous New York mobster John Gotti Jr. hit cinemas in the United States this week. And despite Travolta’s attempts to charm everyone with his adorable dance moves, the reviews have not been good.

The New York Post critic Johnny Oleksinski gave the film zero stars and said he’d “rather wake up next to a severed horse head than ever watch Gotti again”. Glenn Kenny from The New York Times called the movie “a dismal mess, while Jordan Mintzer at The Hollywood Reporter described it as “poorly written, devoid of tension, ridiculous in spots and just plain dull in others”.

And before you start wondering whether this is one of those “so bad it’s good” situations, you might want to read what Kristy Puchko had to say at Pajiba. “This movie is an unmitigated travesty,” she wrote. “You might think this sounds hilariously bad. It must be so bad it’s kind of good, right? Wrong. Gotti is not remotely fun, even ironically.”

The reviews were more mixed when it came to Travolta’s performance. Writing for Entertainment Weekly, Chris Nashawaty said that while Gotti is “not a good movie”, its star delivers “a ferocious and committed performance”. The Guardian critic Guy Lodge was less kind, describing Travolta as “channelling the Teflon Don via Tony Soprano via the Dolmio dad — in a truly dazzling array of crunchy-looking wigs”.

Now it’s worth noting that while the film has been savaged by critics, it’s garnered mostly positive reviews from everyday moviegoers. In fact, it’s currently sitting on a Rotten Tomatoes audience score of 71 percent. The divide between critics and audiences has seemingly inspired a new marketing strategy, with recent ads for the film attacking reviewers as “trolls behind a keyboard”.

Audiences loved Gotti but critics don’t want you to see it… The question is why??? Trust the people and see it for yourself! pic.twitter.com/K6a9jAO4UH

— Gotti Film (@Gotti_Film) June 19, 2018

Only… we’re not completely sure about those audience reviews. As Business Insider points out, many of the user accounts posting positive reviews were only created this month, and have only reviewed Gotti and nothing else. Methinks there’s something fishy going on.

Gotti does not currently have an Australian release date.