Gigli (2003)

Ah, Gigli, the film dubbed by many to have been the next Ishtar...at least, until The Cat In The Hat came along. The truth is, Hollywood has a shorter attention span than a Ritalin-less five-year old on twelve cans of Coke, so when the 'mainstream' critics chant that a movie is the Worst Film Ever it's likely to cling to that title for only one year, at most, before the next
Waterworld or Battlefield Earth blunders its way into people's hearts. Only people who have known the pleasures and horrors of b-cinema know that there are 'bad movies' and then there are 'BAD MOVIES,' and the worst a Hollywood studio can dredge up pales in comparison to the worst an Andy Sidaris can create.

Yet even in the realm of soon-to-be-forgotten multi-million dollar flops, Gigli stands proud. It has perhaps the most irritating, undeserving couple in Hollywood history, who come out in full bloom in this vanity project to end all vanity projects. As if this were not enough, the filmakers apparently realized that having Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez (henceforth named "FerPez") in a traditional romantic comedy would probably cause an unprecedented wave of murder-suicides, so they decided to try something 'different': why not have Affleck and FerPez flex their acting muscles by being in a third-rate Quentin Tarantino rip-off, complete with professional criminal protagonists and lengthy dialogues?

Just thinking about the very concept of Pulp Fiction a la Affleck and FerPez will give you a good idea about why this movie got to be the laughingstock du jour. Watching Ben Affleck and FerPez try to act like two hardened, professional criminals - named Gigli and Ricki respectively - is a disturbingly close approximation of what it might be like to see Donny and Marie Osmond act in a Spike Lee or David Lynch film: it just ain't right. In fact, every time Ben Affleck's street tough goes off on a violent, f-word peppered rant or FerPez's intellectually-minded assassin philosophically compares something like kissing to cunlingus, you get the feeling that Gigli has captured the essence of that kid who brags about owning gangsta rap CDs and wears a chain around his wallet and steel-toed boots yet shops at the GAP. It's like the birth of a new genre: the poseur film.

The real problem is that this movie doesn't offer much else other than seeing Affleck and FerPez's, um, 'range.' The plot itself is rather weak in things that happen: Affleck is hired to kidnap a federal prosecutor's retarded brother Brian to blackmail him into dropping charges against this mob boss; FerPez is sent to join him; they're asked to cut off Brian's finger but refuse even though they're, you know, professionals and all that; they get a 'replacement' finger from the morgue; get threatened by the mob boss; and free Brian and ride off into the sunset. In the 40 or so minutes between each plot event, we get to experience the magic only FerPez and Affleck generate. This movie's romantic subplot is particularly special since here FerPez is playing a lesbian and not to give away anything, but Affleck does succeed in making her play for the other team. So apparently the moral is gay people stop being gay once someone attractive from the opposite sex relentlessly hits on them. So much for liberal Hollywood.

If this review seems a bit 'Bennifer-centric,' it's simply because there really isn't much else to talk about. Like any true vanity project, this entire movie is simply the massaging of two egos. Their third wheel, Brian, is just used alternatively as either the Odious Comic Relief or the Sympathy Magnet (it's so rarely a good idea to combine the two roles and that's oh so true here). While Robert DeNiro and Christopher Walken do appear, as the mob boss and a befuddled detective respectively, it's only in roles amounting to no more than extraneous cameos. They stride in, give a monologue to remind the audience what good acting sounds like, and go out, doing nothing for the already paper-thin plot. It's simply a shame to see two great actors being wheeled out like set pieces to give such a pointless film the weight of legitimacy.

In the end, is there anything good to say about Gigli? Well, although it tries so hard but fails so miserably to imitate the pop-driven black comedy of Tarantino, there are some jokes that don't fall flat, like the all too brief appearance of Lainie Kazan (of My Big Fat Greek Wedding fame) as Gigli's mother and the fact that the film's climactic moments unfold at the beach where an episode of "Baywatch" is being filmed. In the end, though, the best recommendation I can give to Gigli is that it's not Vice Academy. Gigli may not have bottomed out and joined the ranks of true 'b-cinema,' but it has earned a lasting place in the Hollywood Walk of Shame.