Gotti (2018)

“Nepotism: The Motion Picture”

🎥 Let’s start by showing y’all the trailers, shall we?

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Non-Spoiler Plot Rundown 📝

Gotti desperately wants to be Goodfellas. Instead, it plays like if Goodfellas was directed by your uncle who once read a Wikipedia page about the mob.

The film follows John Gotti, the “Teflon Don,” from his rise in the Gambino family, through his glory years, to his eventual prison sentence. On paper, that’s juicy material. In execution? It’s like watching a two-hour mob cosplay put on by people who want to convince you their dad was actually a hero.


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Background: How This Disaster Happened 📚

This mess was based on John Gotti Jr.’s memoirs, and surprise surprise, Gotti Jr. had heavy involvement in shaping the script. Translation: this isn’t a biopic, it’s a family PR campaign with a production budget.

The project bounced between directors, producers, and studios for years. At one point Barry Levinson was attached. Eventually, it landed with Kevin Connolly (yes, E from Entourage). When you hire “E” to direct the most infamous mobster biopic in history, you already know you’re screwed.


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Character & Actor Rundown 🎭

👔 John Gotti – John Travolta
Wigs, growly voice, and more makeup than Sephora. He’s supposed to be intimidating, but he feels like he wandered off the set of Saturday Night Fever: The Mob Years.

👩 Victoria Gotti – Kelly Preston
Travolta’s real-life wife plays his wife onscreen. The chemistry should be electric — instead it’s like watching two people rehearse for dinner theater.

🧔 Aniello Dellacroce – Stacy Keach
The man deserved better. He’s playing Shakespeare while everyone else is doing improv at Chuck E. Cheese.

🧑‍🦱 John Gotti Jr. – Spencer Rocco Lofranco
Written as a misunderstood heir. In reality, the movie scrubs him cleaner than a mobster at a Senate hearing.


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The Mafia Hated This Film 🕴️

Here’s the part that kills me: real mobsters hated this film.

When it screened in New York, actual wiseguys walked out. Their reaction?

“Gotti wasn’t like that. He was a clown.”

“This is propaganda for his son.”

“They’re trying to make him a hero. He wasn’t. He was a liability.”


Imagine making a mob movie so bad that the mafia, who normally love their own myth-making, say: “nah, this is too much spin.” That’s the cinematic equivalent of a roast.


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Nepotism & Propaganda 💸

This isn’t a movie. It’s a resume-padding commercial for the Gotti family.

The FBI are painted as villains.

Gotti is framed as “for the people.”

His murders and extortions? Glossed over.


The result: Mafia LARPing 101.


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Rotten Tomatoes Fiasco 🍅

Here’s where it gets hilarious. When Gotti dropped, it scored a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

Instead of accepting defeat, the studio launched a PR campaign screaming, “The critics don’t want you to see this movie! The people love it!” They even released ads attacking Rotten Tomatoes directly.

The kicker? That “audience score” boost came from suspiciously bot-like accounts. Imagine being so desperate that you fake fan reviews for your own propaganda film… and still can’t get past 30%.

It’s like failing a group project you wrote yourself.


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Why It’s One of the Worst Films Ever 👎

Editing that jumps around like it was shuffled in iTunes.

Travolta doing more wig acting than actual acting.

Pitbull on the soundtrack (yes, Mr. Worldwide is here to ruin your mob movie).

Historically inaccurate to the point of parody.


It’s Goodfellas if Goodfellas was written by someone who thought “based on a true story” meant “make up whatever you want.”


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Final Thoughts & Rating ⭐

At the end of the day, Gotti is propaganda dressed up as cinema. It’s not gritty. It’s not accurate. It’s not even entertaining in a “so-bad-it’s-good” way. It’s just bad.

Rating: 1/10 💀


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Spoilers 🔴

Eventually, the real Gotti got caught. The “Teflon Don” finally stuck thanks to wiretaps and Sammy “The Bull” Gravano flipping on him. He got life in prison without parole and died of throat cancer in 2002. Not exactly the folk hero ending this film wants you to believe.

The movie frames him as a misunderstood Robin Hood. That’s laughable. He wasn’t feeding the poor. He was lining his pockets while entire neighborhoods lived in fear. Calling him a hero is like calling Darth Vader “a misunderstood single dad.”

Now here’s where the movie (and Gotti Jr.) completely lose the plot: it tries to push this ongoing argument that John Gotti was a “hero of the people.”

👎 Reality check:

Heroes don’t order hits on their own men.

Heroes don’t extort entire neighborhoods.

Heroes don’t rack up bodies like a Call of Duty killstreak.


What Gotti does is slap a Robin Hood filter over a mobster and hope the audience buys it. They show him shaking hands, patting kids on the head, being all “for the neighborhood,” while casually ignoring the fact that he was bleeding those same neighborhoods dry.

That’s why even the real-world mafia rolled their eyes at this film. They came out of theaters saying: “Gotti wasn’t a hero. He was a clown. A liability.” When even mobsters won’t back up the myth you’re selling, that’s game over.

And then… the infamous ending.

Travolta as Gotti breaks the fourth wall, looks straight at the audience, and says:

> “You may never see another person like me again, even if you live to be 5,000.”



Excuse me? Five thousand? Not 500, not 1,000 — 5,000. That’s such a random number it feels like they rolled dice in the writers’ room. It doesn’t make Gotti sound larger than life. It makes him sound like a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving.

Instead of walking out in awe, you leave the theater laughing — and not in the way they intended.


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🔥 In the end, Gotti isn’t just the worst mob movie ever. It’s a masterclass in how not to make a biopic.