Gotti

I decided to watch:

Gotti (1996).

This HBO movie has been called the most accurate mafia movie ever by former made man Michael Franzese and I can see why.

Starring in the main role as John Gotti, we have veteran actor Armand Assante, and his co-stars including William Forsythe, Anthony Quinn and no less than five future Sopranos members. Gotti was at the time the most popular movie HBO had produced and in fact became the springboard for The Sopranos.

The movie starts in 1973 and concludes in 1992 and takes us and Gotti from the boss of a small crew in the New York Gambino family to the very top. There isn't all that much more I can say about the plot. There is a lot of talking, even more shouting and some murders as one would expect. Surprisingly enough, Gotti isn't a very violent movie despite the killings.

With a cast like this, it is no surprise that the scenes are mostly pretty good, and the music is what it is supposed to be, but I have a big problem with this movie; there is no real coherent plot. Gotti is essentially a collection of scenes set in chronological order but the flow is almost non existent. It felt to me like the writers sat down and wrote out the isolated scenes and then the director filmed them and that is that. I wasn't expecting Goodfellas, but some cohesion would have been nice. In a movie that spans 20 years you get no proper passage of time. Sure, Gotti's hair gets a bit grayer and he dresses nicer, but otherwise the story feels like it took twenty months not years. It rushes through some events, and dwells on others and maybe I missed something, but I was genuinely surprised at the poor flow.

That said, Gotti is by no means a bad movie, but it would have benefited greatly from better editing. Do we really need to see the FBI agents drinking in a club, depressed at Gotti's latest acquittal? No, we don't. The feds can remain anonymous unless they are important as individuals like in Donnie Brasco. Did we need to see Gotti visiting his dying friend and crew member in a hospital and hand feeding him the filling in a cannoli? Again, no. Would I have liked to see more than one scene on the final decision to kill the current boss of the family? Yes. You get the point, I'm sure.

So, do I recommend this movie? If you are interested in the subject matter, then yes I do. We are talking about the real events that surrounded a mob boss who was made Time Magazines Man of the Year after all, and that is fascinating, but if you only want an entertaining mob movie, there are others that are just better films. Gotti is not a bad movie, but disappointingly it's not great either.

That's that and all that. Join me again next time and until then, have a great week!