 |
| Small-time mob enforcer Larry Gigli (Ben Affleck) is attracted to his lesbian partner, Ricki (Jennifer Lopez). Hilarity does not ensue. |
Release Date: Aug. 1, 2003. Running Time: 116 minutes. Writer: Martin Brest. Producer: Martin Brest, Casey Silver. Director: Martin Brest.
THE PLOT:
Larry Gigli (Ben Affleck) is a small-time enforcer for Louis (Lenny Venito), a low-level Los Angeles mobster. Larry thinks of himself as a tough guy, but he mostly gets menial assignments, such as collecting overdue payments.
It's after one such job that Louis gives him a more challenging assignment: to kidnap Brian (Justin Bartha), the autistic brother of a federal prosecutor who is bringing a case against mob boss Starkman (Al Pacino). Louis sees this as a chance to take some initiative and move up in the organization... assuming Larry can manage not to screw it up.
To make sure Larry doesn't bungle it, he assigns a second enforcer: Ricki (Jennifer Lopez), a beautiful but tough lesbian. Ricki instantly dismisses Larry as every bit the idiot Louis thinks. However, as they work together, babysitting Brian and waiting for further instructions, the unexpected happens - they begin to form an unlikely friendship.
But for Larry, friendship just isn't enough...
 |
| Larry and Ricki eat an awkward meal with their kidnap victim, autistic Brian (Justin Bartha). |
CHARACTERS:
Larry Gigli: The title character is a man who strives to seem tough but utterly fails to pull it off. If this had been made twenty years later, he'd doubtless refer to himself as an "alpha." We're meant to see his inner decency gradually emerge as he sheds his devotion to that self-image. It's a solid character arc... on paper. Too bad the script's idea of character development is to directly tell the audience this, with little sense of any gradual shift in behavior. "Tell don't show" also applies to Larry's status as a supposed screw up. He's labeled this by Louis and Ricki, but the only real mistake we see him making up to that point is letting his guard down when Ricki shows up and smiles at him. Ben Affleck is terrible here. When he's not directly speaking, he mostly just stares slack-jawed into space waiting for his next line.
Ricki: Jennifer Lopez is marginally better, in that she at least appears to be awake. She fails to convince as a tough girl, though... which is odd, because she was 100% convincing as a tough, smart young woman in Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight just five years earlier. The script does her no favors. As with Larry, we're told that she's tough without ever seeing it. The closest the film comes to showing her doing anything is when she intimidates a group of noisy teenagers. She also doesn't convince as a lesbian, because what we mainly see is her flirting with Ben Affleck from literally her first second of screen time all the way to the end of the movie.
Brian: Justin Bartha plays the autistic young man Larry kidnaps... and yes, he's awful, but I don't see how he could have not been. The script's research into autism seems to have consisted of whatever Martin Brest remembered from whenever he watched Rain Man. "Discount Rain Man" pretty much describes both character and performance, only with the "comedy" additions of an overactive libido and Tourette's Syndrome to justify him bursting out swearing at random intervals. Making Brian a triple threat: terminally unfunny while also being inaccurate and insulting as a representation of most people with autism and most people with Tourette's.
Detective Jacobellis: Christopher Walken drops by for exactly one scene as... well, Christopher Walken. I don't know whether he actually goes off script, but I'd bet on it when he rants about alien abductions in the middle of dropping exposition about Brian's brother. He also pauses every so often to stare piercingly at Ben Affleck. I think the intent is that he's trying to rattle Gigli into revealing something, but Walken plays it more as if he's wondering what Affleck's eyeballs taste like. Then he whoops about Marie Callender pies sitting on top of foreheads (?) before leaving both apartment and movie just as abruptly as he came in. I think it's the oddest Christopher Walken performance I've seen - and I've seen both cuts of Wild Side.
Starkman: Al Pacino also appears for a single scene, presumably as a favor to the director who finally delivered him his long-sought Oscar. Both he and Walken ended up nominated for Worst Supporting Actor Razzies. Unlike Walken, Pacino doesn't deserve that. It's definitely an over-the-top "21st century Pacino" performance, with him mixing exaggerated mannerisms and shouted threats. But it's also the movie's best scene, with Pacino convincingly injecting a hint of menace that's sadly absent from the rest.
 |
| An overacting Al Pacino provides the movie with its single best scene. |
"SAY SOMETHING NICE":
Gigli has a passable opening. The film fades in on Larry Gigli amiably chatting. At first, we think he's just narrating his thoughts. Then we see that he's actually speaking... to a man he has tied and placed into a machine in a laundromat. It's dumb - Larry didn't even bother to lock the door, so a customer wanders in during this - but it sets a tone that mixes comedy with the threat of violence. If the rest of the movie had managed to sustain this tone, then I doubt it would be forming a part of this review series.
THE UNKINDEST CUT:
This is famously not the movie director Martin Brest wanted to make. The studio rejected his 160 minute cut of the film, probably fearful of a repeat of Brest's financially unsuccessful Meet Joe Black (a film that I liked, though I won't deny that it was bloated).
The execs seized control, demanding five weeks of extensive reshoots that transformed Gigli from an edgy crime caper into a mainstream romantic comedy, the better to capitalize on the (frankly inexplicable) tabloid fascination with the romance between co-stars Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. In a 2023 interview with Variety, Brest observed that "the entire context of the film was upended, (and) the original intention was pretty much obliterated."
To be clear, I doubt that Brest's version would have been a good movie. Affleck at this point in his career wasn't a substantial enough screen presence to carry it over the rough edges, and the bones of a good picture simply are not present in the idiotic plot. That said, Brest's cut almost certainly would have been less bad. The summary I read of the original, darker final Act sounds much better than the ending the film got; and given how badly the movie flopped, the reshoots amounted to throwing more money onto the funeral pyre.
That said, I have no idea what possessed Brest to deliver a 160-minute cut in the first place. Never mind that his contract only gave him final cut up to 130 minutes, essentially enabling the studio to take it away from him... at more than forty minutes less than that, the theatrical cut feels incredibly sluggish. I can't speak to Brest's cut, but I'm pretty sure you could knock 15 minutes off the theatrical version without it even being noticeable.
 |
| The opening scene, one of the few bits where Ben Affleck manages a facial expression. |
THOUGHTS:
"It's turkey time! Gobble-gobble!"
-Jennifer Lopez pauses to review Gigli in the midst of acting in it.
I'm a little disappointed.
Gigli is almost as infamous as a bad movie as Battlefield Earth, with titles like "one of the worst movies ever made" attached to it regularly. Battlefield was a spectacular mess, so bad on every level that it was actually kind of compelling to watch. By contrast, Gigli is... an ordinary bad movie.
I'm not trying to defend Gigli. It's dumb and, what's worse, it's dull. A weak crime plot seems to have been bizarrely welded to an even weaker relationship comedy. The two leads are unconvincing, and the film's attempted ruminations on human sexuality have less insight than the ramblings of a stoned and horny undergraduate.
But that's all it is: an ill-conceived, poorly scripted movie that's bad in ways tons of movies are bad. It's not even bad enough to be funny except for a couple of bizarre moments (Christopher Walken; "gobble-gobble"). For the most part, it's just kind of... there.
 |
| Christopher Walken pops up for an extremely weird cameo. |
OTHER MUSINGS:
"Just kind of there" is a fair summation of Gigli's plot progression, in that the plot doesn't so much progress as sit there.
As I stated earlier, the bones of a good picture aren't here, but this movie doesn't even use the scant opportunities at its disposal. Larry's meant to be a screw-up, but his kidnapping of Brian goes about as smoothly and easily as possible. Why not have him make a mess of it and only barely get away with his target? It would be a better scene, potentially creating the mix of comedy and suspense that made the director's '80s films so enjoyable. It would also explain exactly why Louis assigns Ricki after that. As it stands, I have no idea why he didn't just turn to her in the first place.
The hassle-free initial kidnapping is pretty much how every would-be complication goes. After Christopher Walken comes by and lets Larry know that he's kidnapped the brother of a federal prosecutor, Larry and Ricki take Brian out of the apartment to go... um, be visible in public, I guess. Why not have Walken's detective staking out the place, with them having to stumble around the area to escape without him noticing. It would require Walken for all of a handful of additional shots, and it would show the anti-heroes having to be clever to get around him.
Also, why do they leave the apartment at all? It's not as if they go somewhere else, even though taking refuge at Ricki's place might open up both dramatic and comedic possibilities. If they did that, then the film could engage a bit with its half-hearted attempt to study the spectrum of sexuality by showing Ricki's circle of friends But no. Larry and Ricki just sort of drive around a bit, being so worried about the federal prosecutor that they and Brian have lunch at an outdoor, public area (!), all before dropping in on Larry's mother (Lainie Kazan in a brief, unfunny cameo) before... returning to the very apartment they just fled. Well, that was exciting.
Gigli's dumb plot is a setup that leads nowhere. For most of the running time, nothing happens and it just keeps on not happening. Larry and Ricki sort of hang out together, sort-of flirting before Ricki reminds Larry that she's gay, really honest, before directing glances his way and flirting some more.
Much of it plays like a bad sitcom: What if a horny tough guy became roommates with a beautiful lesbian? Except the sitcom would probably have been more entertaining.
 |
| Larry bonds with Brian. Since Larry's dull and Brian's annoying, I truly don't care. |
THE OTHER NOMINEES:
Gigli was such an instantly notorious flop that it pretty much had a lock on the award.
The Cat in the Hat was probably its only serious competitor for Worst Picture, a live action adaptation of the classic Dr. Seuss book starring Mike Myers as the titular cat. The results were so bad that Seuss's widow halted further live action versions of her husband's work. I haven't seen it, but the handful of clips I've viewed convince me that I should stay far away.
Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle is an odd choice for this list. I haven't seen it, but it didn't review that badly, and though it underperformed expectations, it still managed to eke out a profit. Its disappointing performance did put paid to any further films in the series until the disastrous 2019 reboot.
From Justin to Kelly continued the 2000s trend of the Razzies nominating an attempt by a music star to move to movies. This time it was Kelly Clarkson's turn - though against her wishes and as a result of contractual obligation.
Wikipedia calls Rick de Oliveira's The Real Cancun a "reality film" - essentially, reality TV on the bigscreen. It follows American teens on Spring Break, and it frankly sounds duller than Gigli. No, I haven't watched it. And if a gun was held to my head, I'd sit through The Cat in the Hat before attempting to endure this slop.
OVERALL:
Gigli is a bad movie, but it doesn't live down to its reputation as one of the worst films ever made. Its biggest problem is that it's boring. After a passably competent setup, nothing happens except talk. Very badly-written talk. This persists until about the 90 minute mark, when Al Pacino finally shows up to push the wafer-thin story to its conclusion.
I'd agree with Jennifer Lopez's statement that there are worse movies out there. It's not that Gigli is unwatchable; it's that I can't really think of any good reason to watch it. It's not even bad enough to be fun.
Rating: Turkey.
Worst Picture - 2002: Swept Away
Worst Picture - 2004: Catwoman (not yet reviewed)
Review Index
To receive new review updates, follow me:
On BlueSky:
On Threads:
No comments:
Post a Comment