Gigli (2003, Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez, Al Pacino, Christopher Walken, Justin Bartha) – So Bad It’s Good Movie 3

OK, look, everyone has bad days. But if you’re a huge movie star, everyone else gets to know about it. Made at the height of the wildly overheated international publicity over the romance of its stars, the 2003 ‘thriller’ Gigli is a film guaranteed to make you giggly.

Ben Affleck stars as lowlife crook Larry Gigli, who falls for lipstick lesbian Ricki (Jennifer Lopez) when she tells him he’s gay in this hilariously bad romantic thriller, a prime candidate for one of the worst films of all time. It became the first film in the history of the Razzie Awards to take all the top five categories, including Worst Picture, Worst Actor (Affleck), Worst Actress (Lopez), Worst Director (Martin Brest) and Worst Screenplay (Brest). It also claimed a sixth Razzie for Worst Screen Couple.

The sexier that Ben and J-Lo attempt to be, the funnier it gets. She tries to turn him on by showing him how fit she is, then tells him ‘it’s turkey time, gobble, gobble’. So, like the gentleman he is, he does. Looking understandably puzzled there and throughout, Affleck is amiable but he just can’t play lowlife to save his life.

Though you’d hardly know it, Affleck is meant to be a rough, thuggish type ordered by the mob to kidnap a mentally challenged young man, Brian (Justin Bartha), the brother of a California district attorney. Affleck abducts the man from his mental hospital and holds him hostage in his apartment. And J-Lo’s no more convincing as a tough nut sent to keep tabs on him and make sure he doesn’t mess the job up. Ben and J-Lo go on the run and start to fall in love!

To be fair, as written, the role of a tough-guy hit-man, lowly and inept but with a heart of gold is an impossible cliché to play anyway. Good though he is as an actor, Affleck could never have conquered his miscasting and pulled this off. And J-Lo’s role as a lesbian assassin is just embarrassing, with a hint of homophobia around it. Uma Thurman or Milla Jovovich might have been able to do it. Thurman and John Travolta, maybe.

For perhaps the only time in their lives, Al Pacino (as the crook Starkman) and Christopher Walken (as the cop Detective Stanley Jacobellis) are terrible, giving embarrassing, egg-on-face performances. But they’re lucky that they are only cameos. And then there’s the other main character of Brian being referred to as a ‘retard’, which is truly poor, and gives nice actor Bartha a bad time too.

Writer-director Martin Brest comes up with some hysterically appalling, brilliantly laughable dialogue and lets the movie drift badly as director. It’s turkey time, indeed, guys. Pacino starred in (and won an Oscar for) Brest’s Scent of a Woman in 1992. Brest also made Midnight Run and Beverly Hills Cop.

This movie severely damaged Ben and J-Lo’s movie popularity. Affleck eventually restored his career and credibility as a director, winning an Oscar for Best Film in 2013 with Argo.

You don’t have to feel too sorry for them. J-Lo was paid $12million and Affleck $12.5million. That’s nearly $25million between them! Combined, that’s more than three times the film’s worldwide gross of $7,266,209. The film cost $54million.

It received such bad reviews that it was dropped by every UK cinema after only one week. In the US it broke the record at the time for the largest second weekend drop in box-office, with an 81.9 per cent fall.

But this film is well remembered as a permanent stain and has one of the lowest IMDb votes for any major movie. Now, we can just sit back and enjoy – and laugh!

It’s just possible that it’s a failed masterpiece. With the tabloid frenzy around the stars, the studio forced director Brest into cutting 40 minutes from his dark and violent 160-minute original and re-writing and re-shooting many sequences to turn it into a romantic comedy.

PS: Gigli is pronounced Jee-lyee and is Italian for lilies as well as the name a type of short-cut, fluted pasta, also known as cornetti di bue.

© Derek Winnert 2013 So Bad It’s Good Movie 3 derekwinnert.com