Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies ever. This time, we’re looking back at Gigli, serial murderer of careers, reputations, and romances, nominee for nine Razzies, winner of six including Worst Picture, and eventual nominee for Worst Movie of the 2010s.
The Razzies can smell blood from many months away. Far more reliably than a movie’s quality, they are an excellent indicator of a movie’s level of notoriety at the time of its release. A standalone bad movie is tasty enough, but a bad movie with a Big Stupid Story surrounding it is a delectable rare steak. We’ve seen this before with movies funded by cults, movies starring fallen ingenues, and movies featuring large quantities of elephant semen. We now see it again with perhaps the prime example of the reputation becoming the movie, the 2003 romantic(?) comedy(?) thriller(?) Gigli.
I am begging you to put the words “coming soon” literally anywhere other than where you put them.
The tragedy of Gigli – which must surely rank among the worst movie titles that are neither pornographic nor word salad, as it means nothing outside of the movie’s context and very little inside it – begins with its beleaguered director, Martin Brest. An NYU- and AFI-educated director and screenwriter, Brest had made a name for himself in the ‘80s with critically and commercially successful action-comedies like Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and Midnight Run (1988). Despite these early successes, Brest worked only sporadically in Hollywood over the next decade. In 1992 he made his first foray into drama with Scent of a Woman, which received mixed reviews overall but did earn star Al Pacino his first (and to this day, only) acting Oscar. His next film, the romantic mystery Meet Joe Black (1998), earned unenthusiastic reviews. So for his next film, he decided to go back to his roots and make another fast-paced crime movie, this one about a cocky mobster who gets in over his head when a kidnap plan goes haywire.
Things started off simply enough. Ben Affleck, who by 2003 was both an Oscar-winning screenwriter and an A-list leading man, signed on to play the mobster. Halle Berry had originally signed on to play his female counterpart, but she had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts with X2: X-Men United and was replaced with fellow sex symbol Jennifer Lopez. Reliable stalwarts Christopher Walken and Brest’s old buddy Al Pacino signed on for cameo roles. Everything was proceeding according to plan.
Then Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez made a terrible mistake: they fell in love.
What else is one to do under the influence of the Father of Mindfulness?
Lopez had only recently filed for divorce from dancer Cris Judd, and when the tabloid press sniffed out the romance on the set, their relationship went suddenly and very loudly public. As “Bennifer” became the hottest celebrity gossip of the early 2000s, the bigwigs at Columbia got a wonderful, awful idea: what if they ordered eleventh-hour rewrites of the script of this straightforward mob thriller into a romantic comedy to capitalize on the publicity?
What do you mean, audiences will see that for the brainless, contemptuous moneysnatch it is?
What if, indeed. Principal photography on Gigli wrapped in early 2002, but the movie spent another eighteen months in post-production, with extensive rewrites, reshoots, and re-edits causing the movie’s budget to rocket out of control. Brest fought tooth and nail to save his original movie, at one point shutting down post-production for several months to try to work out the creative differences, but nothing was to be done against the desires of Columbia and Revolution for a Bennifer cash-in. What had been a straightforward mob thriller with a tragic ending – Larry Gigli bleeds to death on a beach – was chopped to bits and Frankensteined into a romantic comedy with mob thriller trimmings.
It didn’t work. Gigli had become a cynical celebrity stunt movie in the public’s eyes long before it hit theaters, and once it finally reached its premier, it did so with a historic bellyflop. Budget? $75 million. Box office? $6 million domestic, with barely another million overseas. A colossal embarrassment for everyone involved, and naturally the Razzies gobbled it up the way hyenas gobble rotting carrion.
Affleck emerged from the carnage basically unscathed, though his relationship with Lopez did end in 2004 (to be rekindled nearly two decades later). Lopez took more of a hit, but remained a major force of nature in the pop music world and even reestablished herself as a “respectable” actress in 2019 with Hustlers. Martin Brest, on the other hand, has completely disappeared from moviemaking. No directing. No writing. No producing. He maintains that he had a good run of it, but he definitely looks back on his Gigli experience with some understandable bitterness. And unlike some Razzie-winning directors who still defend their anti-masterworks, Brest harbors no such affection for Gigli, calling it “a bloody mess that deserved its excoriation.”
So, did he deserve better? Did Gigli deserve better?
THE STORY
That’s a question with a complicated answer, that is. Gigli absolutely deserved better. Brest probably did too. But had Gigli succeeded, I don’t think that would have been Brest’s doing.
It sounds like Martin Brest went through hell trying and failing to make the movie he wanted to make, and it’s a genuine shame that he appears to have a life sentence in director jail following the failure of Gigli. But there’s a small issue with his version of the story: it’s flat backwards wrong. Not regarding the executive meddling, but the results of it. Along with Color of Night, Gigli has made me pro-executive meddling. Because in Gigli, everything that could conceivably be part of a serious mob movie is terrible, and everything involving both Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez is great. Maybe Columbia and Revolution cut all the brilliant parts of Brest’s original work, but from what’s in front of us, Bennifer saved this movie.
Ben Affleck plays the titular Larry Gigli (rhymes with “wheelie,” not “wriggly” – there will be three or four lame jokes about the pronunciation of his name before the script gives up), a low-level mobster full of unearned bravado, manly swagger, and a really bad case of the mumbles. Affleck spends the entire first thirty minutes of the movie channeling the male lead in a high school production of Grease, right down to high school actor level diction problems.
Tell me more, tell me more, ’cause he sounds like a drag.
Anyway, Gigli has been tasked by his skeezy boss Louis (Lenny Venito) with kidnapping Brian (Justin Bartha), the younger brother of a federal prosecutor, in the hopes that said prosecutor will then reconsider going after their joint superior Starkman (Al Pacino, presumably thinking he owed Brest a favor). Brian has a nonspecific developmental disorder that causes him to deliver offensive dialogue in a baby-talk voice at the speed of a machine gun. Between Bartha’s Chip-and-Dale impersonation and Affleck’s mouthful of marbles, it’s a miracle I understood anything that happened in the first thirty minutes.
I really, extremely do not want to get into the matter of whether Bartha’s performance is a sensitive, nuanced, accurate portrayal of mental illness or developmental disability, because of course it isn’t. That was, like, eighty-seventh on anyone’s list of priorities for this movie, and if you go in expecting anything that would fly in a $75 million movie in 2024, that’s your own fault. Better that you just accept what you’re about to see and grit your teeth for the duration, though nothing can prepare you for a few of the things that will later emerge from this character’s mouth.
Anyway, manly swagger aside, Larry Gigli is in reality not a terribly gifted mobster, and he makes a right hash of the kidnapping. So Louis sends in a lady mobster going by the name of Ricki (Lopez) to take charge of the operation and keep an eye on Gigli. Gigli immediately develops the hots for her because she looks like Jennifer Lopez and is also much smarter, tougher, and more competent than he, but alas, she is unavailable because she is smarter, tougher, and more competent than he, and also she’s a lesbian. So she says.
Maybe she’s only into people who can make normal faces in screencaps.
So now in addition to keeping a hostage who isn’t very good at being a hostage in his apartment, Gigli has to control his raging hard-on for his co-worker, and that’s before the higher-ups in the mob start demanding more grisly violence from Gigli and Ricki as part of the kidnap scene just as the two of them have started to develop some fondness for Brian. What’s a sexually frustrated mobster to do?
THE BAD
So if all that sounded hopelessly wretched to you, well, it is. It also only covers the first thirty minutes or so of the movie, and it makes me wonder how much of Gigli’s awful reputation came from word of people who walked out of it. Gigli does something interesting and almost certainly unintentional in that it frontloads ninety percent of its very worst material. If you can get through that first act, things will improve substantially. But you do have to get through that first act, and that is a movie-watching feat of Sisyphean drudgery.
First, there’s Affleck. Ben Affleck has proven himself over the years to be an immensely gifted actor and filmmaker with versatile talents in both comedy and drama, so I have to assume he was simply working through spite here, because his performance for the first thirty minutes is just awful. His character is an unlikable tool who doesn’t even make up for it by being a decent mobster. The movie will later begin to systematically strip away his unlikable toolness, but that does not make it any more pleasant to watch before the stripping away happens. He is especially difficult to watch alongside Bartha, who plays Brian with a weird combination of pitiful innocence and crude, manic vulgarity. Neither is Venito any help; he looks lost and confused, like he’s waiting for someone to tell him literally anything about who his character is.
Excuse me, could you tell me how to get to the film shoot, please?
All of these people have been blocked by Brest or whoever was actually directing the movie by the time it escaped from the editing room in boxy medium shots that do nothing whatsoever to create visual intrigue or panache. That’s a crying shame, because it means we have to rely on their lines.
The script of Gigli is credited in full to Martin Brest, but given the movie’s history, who the hell knows who wrote any given scene or conversation, or if indeed any human being did. Later in this piece, I am going to praise some of the writing in Gigli. That praise must be carefully measured and qualified, because it must stand along the fact that Gigli forced me to listen to a man tell me that the girls on Baywatch “make [his] penis sneeze.” And as if this was not bad enough, he then informs us that when this happens, he says “God bless you” to his penis. And as if this was not bad enough, the movie will later call back to this moment, because someone believes we the viewers will be happy if we remember it. Jennifer Lopez’s infamous “turkey time” line several minutes prior is not a good line by any means, but I suffered far more psychological damage from being forced to listen to Ben Affleck coo “God bless you, penis” at me in what I believe is supposed to be a romantic scene.
THE GOOD
Wretched sex dialogue aside, though, something miraculous happens to Gigli when Jennifer Lopez walks into it. It gets entertaining. In some places, I daresay, it gets good.
First, Lopez herself easily has the best attitude of anyone onscreen (or probably offscren) in Gigli. She’s like the host of an out-of-control sorority party, gamely trying to make sure the guests have a good time and also working overtime to make sure the drunkards don’t find their car keys. She plays Ricki with an unforced no-nonsense exterior and a quiet humanity that contrasts nicely with Affleck’s artificial man’s-man persona and makes his choices seem much more purposeful.
I’d hop in that car with you, Jen.
And speaking of Affleck: contemporary reviews claimed that Affleck and Lopez lacked chemistry onscreen. Contemporary reviews were full of it. In a particular scene that should perhaps have been a short film all its own, Ricki does yoga on Gigli’s floor while Gigli stands a safe, non-boundary-violating distance away. The two deliver competing monologues – first from Gigli, then from Ricki – explaining the relative virtues of the male and female sexual organs. When I put it that way, it undoubtedly sounds ridiculous, so you’re going to have to trust me that Affleck and Lopez turn this scene into a compelling (and sexy) character moment for both Ricki and Gigli. We begin to see, for the first time, the insecurity and doubt in his own inherent value that form the foundation for Gigli’s ridiculous greaser stereotype of a gangster persona. We also see the rock-solid strength and self-awareness – but not, importantly, self-seriousness – that make Ricki much better suited to play the “masculine” role in their budding relationship than Gigli himself.
The two finally have sex in a much-maligned scene that has been accused of being the cinematic equivalent of lesbian conversion sex therapy. I don’t read it as a “conversion” at all, and I think most of the people who badmouth it probably haven’t seen it (only about two dozen people did, based on those box office numbers). Lopez does not play Ricki’s attraction to Gigli as a complication to her identity, let alone a refutation; she simply treats it as an additional dimension, the natural endpoint of her growing affection for a man she has grown to care about deeply. She is unambiguously in charge of their tryst, taking responsibility for both their comfort and pleasure. This is all extremely well-served by John Powell’s gooey string-heavy score, which turns up the soap opera melodrama at all the right moments.
Turns out all Chasing Amy needed was more violas.
The best representation of lesbianism, or bisexuality, we’ve ever seen in a movie? Certainly not, but individual movies have no cultural obligation to be such things; I appreciate it for its understated depiction of the fluidity of female sexuality, and how much more natural and comfortable that fluidity is made out to be than Gigli’s own rigid understanding of how to be a man. Remember how I said before I was going to praise the writing? Parts of Gigli are very, very well-written, enough to make it worth it to claw through that dreadful opening act.
I’m probably thinking about it too hard, but I believe there’s something smart and almost subversive going on under the surface of the central relationship in Gigli. The movie keeps getting in its own way because it’s such a hash of visions, so that smart subversion never fully emerges, but damn if it isn’t trying in the movie’s best scenes.
Sorry, you have the wrong address. This is the boring, cringey mob movie starring Ben Affleck not knowing what he’s doing, not the cheeky romcom where JLo hands him his ass.
But the pleasures of Gigli do not end with Affleck and Lopez! Bartha also becomes much more tolerable once their trio is completed, and genital sternutation aside, he got some genuine cackles out of me in the back half of the movie. I laughed hard during a scene in which Gigli nervously cuts a thumb off a cadaver so that he can pass it off as Brian’s severed thumb, while Brian stands in the foreground reciting the lyrics to Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” as though it is a Shakespearean sonnet.
Gigli also features three cameo roles that are all unmitigated delights. Lainie Kazan plays Larry’s walking stereotype of an Italian mother with all the unbridled enthusiasm of the most embarrassing moms in the world, and she’s magnetic for every second she’s onscreen. At another point, Christopher Walken shows up to play a police detective of Gigli’s acquaintance for five minutes. His character has no bearing whatsoever on the plot, delivers an exceptionally weird monologue – something about covering Ben Affleck in Marie Callender’s pie and ice cream – and then exits without explanation, leaving his castmates in a fog of palpable, and probably real, befuddlement. In other words, it is probably the most Christopher Walken of all Christopher Walken movie moments. At least until he is out-Christopher Walken’d by Al Pacino in the latter’s own five-minute cameo later in the film.
A single image cannot hope to capture the glory of these cameos, so instead, please enjoy Al Pacino’s gangster hair.
I’m not quite ready to declare Gigli an unappreciated masterpiece. Parts of it – only parts, but parts all the same – are as bad as everyone says. But piling contempt on the bad parts of Gigli just feels pointless, because no one has piled more contempt on it than its own creators. It’s like telling a person in the middle of puking that puking is disgusting; you’re not telling anyone anything they don’t know or making them feel better. At this point, Gigli has been through the wringer enough that it’s time to start looking back and celebrating the things it did right, and perhaps admitting that no one gave it a fair chance last time. Ben and Jen finally found their bliss together in the 2020s. Gigli should enjoy the same. And for Pete’s sake, someone please let Martin Brest make another movie.
Quality of Movie: 2.5 / 5. The first act gets half a star. The rest is basically fine and competent. I’m not sure how that averages out, so let’s just call it average and be done.
Quality of Experience: 3.5 / 5. Ben and Jen really are a delight in that back half.
Did the Razzies Get it Right? No. In addition to the giddily stupid From Justin to Kelly (our first ever featured Raspberry!), the 2004 Razzie Worst Picture slate featured our old buddy Mike Myers starring in The Cat in the Hat; not even Gigli’s very worst lines come close to cinematic pus that oozes from that wretched movie’s pores. Not even nominated were Daredevil (2003 was not the best year of Ben Affleck’s career), Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, and Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd. And, well, for that matter, The Room. For 2003 movies, the Razzies did what they do best (besides hating women) and “rewarded” notoriety, probably without seeing most of the movies on the slate.
Want to pick more Raspberries? Check out the rest of the columns in this series!
Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida. She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects. You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog! You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.