Entry #9: Gigli

Release Date: August 1, 2003
Budget: $67,000,000 (inflation adjusted)

As a bit of a background without giving too much away, Gigli stars Ben Affleck (Larry Gigli) as a low-ranking mobster who is charged with kidnapping the mentally challenged brother (Bryan) of a federal prosecutor for extortion purposes.  Jennifer Lopez (Ricki) is conveniently sent in to help out as Affleck's boss doesn't trust him with the job.  Hilarity and love, but mostly love, ensue.

I started reading reviews online in preparation for Gigli and, as I'm sure everyone knows, the movie was universally panned: 1 star on IMDB, 1 star from Rolling Stone, and this scathing quip from the San Francisco Chronicle "'Gigli' doesn't need a review; it needs an inquest. The movie is dead on arrival. Who or what killed it?"  Then, I ran across Roger Ebert's review.  Ebert gave Gigli 2.5 out of 3 stars saying "The movie tries to do something different, thoughtful, and a little daring with their relationship, and although it doesn't quite work, maybe the movie is worth seeing for some scenes that are really very good."  I was confused.  Somebody had to be wrong and I was guessing it was Ebert.  I was expecting the worst.

I did not hate Gigli.  In fact, Gigli doesn't even belong on my list of Worst Movies and anyone who thinks that it does probably only drinks red wine, prefers herbal tea over coffee, takes Pitchfork seriously, and has never seen Troll 2 or Showgirls.  Sure there is a base level of cheese in Gigli that is hard to ignore and some other things that bothered me.  First, there is a lot of unnecessary fucking swearing, akin to the dumb kid in school who couldn't form complete sentences so he just ended them with "shit" to let you know he was done talking.   Second, the soundtrack is awful.  It's this sort of loopy, sunny jazz thing without any apparent ties to what is actually happening in the movie. Third, the relationship between JLo and Affleck is clearly forced into the plot because of what was going on in their real life relationship at the time.  Who really needs two small time thugs to watch a mentally challenged kid?  Finally, the ending takes about 30 minutes when it could have been done in 10 and the cheese factor is turned up to 11 in those final 30 minutes.  But that's about it for my complaints.

I'm not sure how this movie got the bad rap that it did, but it looks like one critic panned it and everyone just jumped on the bandwagon.  There are a lot of nice scenes and in the end I really did want everything to work out for all three main characters.  I stopped short of crying though.  As it turns out, all the other critics WERE wrong, proving once again that Roger Ebert was a man amongst boys.  I'll never doubt Ebert again.

This movie really deserves a positive rating, but since my scale for this project only goes from 0 to -10, I'll have to give it "0".  It's not good, but it does not belong in my Worst Movie of All Time Project.  Go back to film school Peter Travers