Review: Gigli

Romantic comedy. Mob spoof. Dysfunctional family melodrama. Rain Man Redux.

Gigli
Photo: Columbia Pictures

Romantic comedy. Mob spoof. Dysfunctional family melodrama. Rain Man Redux. Indeed, Gigli wishes to have a little something for everyone. Because Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez fell in love on the set of the film, it’s difficult not to look at this mess as a vanity project tailor-made for the couple and targeted at anyone who gets their daily celebrity dish from the E! network. But any gossip-monger going into the film may be turned off by the relationship problems the characters attempt to negotiate.

When a confused Affleck, as Larry Gigli, stares into the horizon at the end of director Martin Brest’s creepy-crawly romantic comedy, it’s anyone’s guess what’s running through the actor’s head. Think of him as a Columbia exec who has to contemplate both the surreal uplift he’s managed to orchestrate by bringing a mentally challenged teen lothario to the set of a would-be Baywatch location shoot and the likelihood that he’ll get his own “Hollywood ending” as recompense. He does get it, but said ending is so cleverly vague that not only should it excite those most likely to embrace this claptrap, it will also keep GLAAD at bay.

Sure, New Age mob contractor Ricki (Jennifer Lopez) inevitably hops in the sack with the repulsive Gigli, but the film doesn’t so much suggest that a Guido can scare the lesbian out of a woman cloyingly fond of Pilates so much as it acknowledges that sex is oftentimes a mission of mercy. Because Brest spends much of the film’s running time torturing his audience with a series of on-screen home invasions (characters are constantly barging into rooms and causing elaborate scenes, but the film’s genre-indecisiveness is certainly more offensive), it’s difficult to follow the otherwise shabby plot. Ostensibly, the story follows Ricki and Gigli’s attempts to kidnap a federal prosecutor’s mentally challenged younger brother, Brian (Justin Bartha), and use the kid as leverage in a case against a hot-tempered low-life played by Al Pacino.

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Gigli pretends to be a sophisticated comedy of the sexes, yet it’s written with the gusto of a 50-year-old who’s finally discovered that a penis can go inside of a vagina. The film isn’t incurious, but Brest has nothing genuinely profound to say about the sexes. When the hypocritical Ricki isn’t soothing Larry’s savage beast with useless metaphoric banter (at one point, Gigli says, “In every relationship there’s a bull and a cow,” and in lengthy, creepily detailed monlogue, Ricki states, “The mouth is the twin sister of the vagina”), the seemingly Tourette’s-afflicted Brian is there to provide more immediate and deliberate comic relief.

Despite your better judgement, you may want to stay past the film’s mid-point or you’ll miss Bartha launching into an impromptu performance of “Baby Got Back” when Affleck begins to hack off a dead man’s thumb using a plastic knife. The horrible noise evokes the much sweeter sound of turntablism and doubles as a nod to Lopez’s infamous posterior. If only any other scene in this bizarre but inane film were anywhere near as clever or original.

Score: 
 Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Ben Affleck, Lenny Venito, Justin Bartha, Lainie Kazan, Christopher Walken, Al Pacino  Director: Martin Brest  Screenwriter: Martin Brest  Distributor: Columbia Pictures  Running Time: 121 min  Rating: R  Year: 2003  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

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