(First posted to Bad Movie Night in 2003.)
At the time I'm writing this review, Gigli has been voted as the Worst Movie of All Time on the Internet Movie Database.
This isn't really fair. I mean, this movie isn't QUITE as bad as Battlefield Earth. But it tries to be.
In this movie, Jennifer "J-Lo" Lopez and Ben "B-Fleck" Affleck play Gangster Extortionists With Hearts of Gold. B-Fleck plays a big, stupid thug who tries to act cool by saying "fucking" every fucking third word. J-Lo plays a holier-than-thou diva who always gets her way and who manages to pussy-whip B-Fleck into submission within 5 seconds of meeting him.
In other words, they play themselves.
Except there are three differences between the character J-Lo portrays in the movie and what J-Lo is like in real life:
(1) In the movie, J-Lo's character is a lesbian. That's right, J-Lo plays a gay-lo. However, her character is a Hollywood lipstick lesbian, which means that instead of her preference for women being an integral part of her personality, she gives it up in a heartbeat for the opportunity to make babies with B-Fleck.
(2) In the movie, J-Lo is always smiling and is fair and kind to everyone she meets, including a poorly-portrayed mentally-impaired guy who has bursts of Tourette's Syndrome. Her character would never THINK of yelling at the mentally-impaired guy for bringing her an Italian bottled water when she explicitly asked for a Swiss bottled water.
(3) In the movie, J-Lo's character is intelligent.
Okay, okay, number (3) above isn't really fair. Her character isn't ALWAYS intelligent. She concocts a cockamame plot to keep the mentally-impaired guy from getting maimed while still pretending to be ruthless extortionists — involving a cadaver and a plastic knife — but the gaping hole in the plan is instantly obvious to anyone with a brain. Of course, the target audience for this film did not include people with brains. No, the target audience for this film was people who want to pay money to see J-Lo and B-Fleck be good-looking and act cool, because darn it, there just aren't enough clips of them being good-looking and acting cool together on Entertainment Tonight.
The 54 million dollar bugdet of this film seems to have been spent entirely on the salaries of its stars and guest stars. (Christopher Walken and Al Pacino appeared for one scene each, and both gave far more memorable performances than J-Lo and B-Fleck.) Almost no money seems to have been spent on advertising — I didn't see any ads for it on TV before it opened or during its opening weekend, which might explain its abyssmal box office performance.
Oh — and, in case you haven't heard yet, the title "Gigli" is an Italian word, and is supposed to be pronounced in such a way that it rhymes with "really." As the movie critic Bruce Newman put it, this is "A rigli, rigli bad movie."
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