Movie Reviews

It was purely a strong bout of curiosity that drove me to rent Gigli. I mean, when a movie is so thoroughly trashed by critics and labelled as one of the worst of the year (or of any year, for that matter), I can't help but think, "Is it really as bad as they say it is?"

The answer, my friends, is a resounding "Yes". It's so incredibly god-awful in so many respects that I can't begin to fathom how the stupid thing even got made in the first place. First, the 'plot' lacks any form of logic. Ben Affleck plays Larry Gigli (a running joke is that no one can pronounce his name correctly. "It rhymes with 'really'". Har har har.). He's an inept, moronic gangster thug whose assignment is to kidnap a federal prosecutor's mentally retarded son and hold him hostage until the prosecutor agrees to drop certain criminal charges against a high-level mob guy. The problem is that Larry's boss knows that Larry is an inept moron. So he also hires Ricki (Jennifer Lopez) to keep an eye on Larry and make sure he doesn't screw things up. Why, I wondered, wouldn't Larry's boss simply hire Ricki to do the job instead, rather than continue to employ the idiotic Larry?

Oh, right... because then Ben and J-Lo wouldn't have been able to 'act' together in the movie. See, apparently Gigli is supposed to be more of a 'romantic dark comedy' than a 'gangster dark comedy'. Unfortunately, Gigli is completely devoid of anything either remotely 'romantic' or 'comedic'. I had a hell of a lot of trouble believing that Larry was able to make Ricki fall for him, because Ricki is a lesbian. Larry does nothing at all in the film that would justifiably 'convert' Ricki into a heterosexual relationship. And as far as the 'comedy' bit goes, relying on a retarded character being made fun of for 'comic relief' is not cool -- it's just mean. Finally, I'm not even going to take a guess as to how both Christopher Walkin and Al Pacino were bribed into making appearances in this turkey.

With all that said and done though, I can't deny that I did have a small amount of fun watching Gigli. It was fun in a "this is so bad, I'm curious to see if could possibly get any worse" kind of way.