Oprah Movie Club Pick for August: Gigli

2003 movie

Rating: 4/20 (Mark: 3/20)

Plot: A lousy hitman abducts a mentally-challenged kid, the brother of a district attorney. A lesbian with a rockin' bod is sent to keep an eye on him and make sure he doesn't screw the whole thing up. Shenanigans!

This movie grossed about five million dollars less than Jennifer Lopez was paid to sort-of act in it. And just over five million dollars less than what Ben Affleck, that douchebag on the poster up there, was paid. The hot couple made 24.5 million for this--highway robbery, if you ask me--and the movie made a little over 7 million. And poor Martin Brest has never worked again.

You almost have to wonder if this whole thing was made as an excuse to show a skimpily-dressed Jennifer Lopez doing yoga for ten minutes, just one of the many many scenes in this movie that were way too long. There are a myriad of problems with this notorious box office bomb, and I'm not sure that I can claim pacing is the worst of them. However, it's definitely one of the biggest issues with this thing. Along with the dialogue. And the acting. And the dreadful combination of that acting and that dialogue which almost makes this seem like the lines are translated and delivered by people who don't speak the language it was written in. And one of the worst scores you'll ever hear. And an almost baffling fatuity. And that rare case where you know exactly where the movie is going to go each step of the way, yet it still doesn't seem to make any sense.

How did Walken and Pacino get dragged into this? Were they promised front-row seats to watch Jennifer Lopez do yoga for ten minutes? Walken's appearance almost seems like an accident, like he showed up on the wrong set and just started doing his thing. I never quite figure out who is character is, why he's important to what little story there was at that point, or why he never popped into the movie again. But Walken delivers, doing a perfect impression of himself with this miniature monologue:

"Man, you know what I'd love to do right now? Go down to Marie Callender's, get me a big bowl, pie, some ice cream on it. Mmm-mmm good. Put some on your head! Your tongue would slap your brains out trying to get to it. Interested? Sure!"

You remember all those hilarious blooper reels at the ends of every Burt Reynolds' movie in the 80's? One of the characters would stumble over a line and then just start making noises that would inevitably end with a raspberry? That's almost what it seems like Walken did up there, almost like he was supposed to say something else but ended up messing up and just saying that but then didn't have the time to do a second take but everybody was cool with it because the whole thing just seemed so Walken, all those verbal twitches. "Put some on your head!" I can understand why Martin Brest would think that was brilliant. Walken's character is only in that one scene, and it's not long enough to give enough of a hint about what mental disorders he might have. I'm pretty sure his first line was an off-screen remark about a chicken, but I can't be sure.

And Pacino! At first, I just thought he was phoning it it, and I was fine with the guy just collecting a paycheck because he put so much of his soul into his best performances. However, Pacino phoning something like this in and essentially parodying himself is still more entertaining than most things you see in movies and anything in the dull story of the titular hitman, his gal pal, and a mentally-challenged rapper. It's barely more than a cameo, but it's enough to make you think he's about to leap through your television screen and bite your couch in half. At that point, no matter how hammy you could accuse Pacino of being in that scene, Affleck and J-Lo don't really deserve to be in the same room with him.

Let's talk about them. Affleck delivers what has to be the poorest performance of his career, a fast-food facsimile of a young gangster thug archetype, and you don't believe a word of the performance. You don't buy that he's got even a smidgen of tough guy in him, that his character actually has any heart, that he's straight, or that he can pour his own cereal and milk. Big Ben's doing an overblown gangster thing like all the other gangster actors in this, and it's the sort of thing that could make a person swear off these artificial gangster movies forever. Affleck just looks big and stupid in this movie, like a dopey-grinned cardboard cut-out of himself. Lopez certainly looks better--and kudos to the folks in charge of her wardrobe--but her acting is probably worse. I believe she's supposed to sound intelligent (surprisingly so, like it's some sort of extended joke that you never really get) and cool, but every single one of her lines sounds forced, like she has to squint to read her cue cards. And her character doesn't really make sense. What is she supposed to be? An assassin? A lesbian assassin? Brest throws in another random character (a second lesbian) to chew on any of the scenery that hasn't already been chewed on, I guess as a way to actually prove that Lopez isn't lying about her sexuality. But where's the part of the movie where we can confirm that she actually has any skills that would make somebody hire her to babysit a guy who is babysitting a handicapped teenager.

That handicapped teenager is played by The Hangover's Justin Bartha, and I don't know whether I'm supposed to laugh at it or not. I think the mental disability is played for laughs, but how can you really be sure? Would anybody really feel comfortable laughing at this in a crowded movie theater? Or, in the case of Gigli, a theater with you and one shady-looking fellow waiting for the yoga scene so that he can have a legitimate reason to take his dick out. I mean, he gets a couple rap songs ("Baby Got Back" and "I Need Love," both kind of awesome) and blurts out half-discernible curse words. There's also a scene where he's laughing at monkeys on a television that rivals the scene with Nicolas Cage laughing at monkeys on a television in Ghost Rider as the best scene where a character laughs at monkeys on a television of all time. And there's some comical dancing. So yes, this is a mental handicap played for laughs, and I'm not sure what this says about anybody involved--the writer/director, Bartha, the viewer, the guy who took his dick out. Note that I'm not complaining at all. I don't need my movies to be politically correct, and this offends in other ways a lot more. And who can complain when you get dialogue like this?

Character: Who the fuck are you?
Bartha's character: You the fuck are you?
Character: What?
Bartha: Huh?

Seriously, it's hard to believe that somebody actually sat down and wrote any of this dialogue. You'd think that any piece of modern technology would reject this sort of thing, lock up and not allow it to happen. Come on, Apple. You've got to step up your game and prevent the next Gigli! Of course, nothing Bartha says in this (and he says way too much) can compete with what is one of the most mind-blowing dialogue snippets ever heard on the silver screen:

"It's turkey time. Gobble gobble. Lay some of that sweet heterolingus on me."

I don't know if this was a written line, if it was improvised, or if it was sent from the gods above directly to J-Lo's lips, but it's movie magic.

Even if the dialogue and story and acting were any good at all in this, I think the music would ruin the thing all by itself. Now, John Powell's an award-winning director who seems to do a lot of music for animated features, and his other stuff might be just fine. This stuff, just a little too heavy to be elevator music, was a passive assault on the ears. And it was constant! Relentless! At one point, I wondered if I would rather hear an hour of this music or the two hours plus of the music with these inane characters having their inane conversations.

I did like one sound effect though: the sound of a plastic knife cutting a thumb off.

This was not a very good Oprah Movie Club pick, so I apologize for that. I really hope this doesn't ruin the club's chances of taking off. What I'm sure was supposed to end up like an intelligent crime black comedy fails so bizarrely that it actually does manage to be entertaining enough as a bad movie. I think it says a lot about Ben Affleck that he's been able to overcome the thing.

So Oprah Movie Clubbers--what did you think of this fucking movie? A misunderstood near-masterpiece? Turkey time?