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.

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”.