Confessions of a Dangerous Pig: GIGLI (2003)

GIGLI
*½
Rating: R
Length: 121 minutes
Director: Martin Brest ("Scent of a Woman"; "Meet Joe Black")
Writer: Martin Brest ("Going in Style"; "Hot Tomorrows")
Starring: Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez, Al Pacino, Christopher Walken, Justin Bartha, Lenny Venito, Lainie Kazan, Missy Crider, Peter Van Norten, Shelby Fenner

I avoided “Gigli” as long as I could even though there was a burning curiosity deep inside of me that wanted to watch it. I had to see how bad it really was. I started watching it when I was in Reno and couldn’t make it past the thirty minute mark. It was bad, I thought to myself, but not that bad. Sure enough, upon finally completing the entire film, the movie isn’t as bad as the general public was lead to believe. However, make no mistake this is not a good film. The immortal Jennifer Lopez line “gobble, gobble” will go down in history as one of the worst in cinema history. Let’s face it, the Ben Affleck/Jennifer Lopez relationship was so played out by the point of the movie’s release that the critics went in hungry, waiting eagerly to rip it apart. And they did, so much in fact, that it still gets mentioned when bad movies are brought up (it is currently ranked #80 on the Internet Movie Database’s Bottom 100 list). I can’t defend the movie and I don’t want to, but I will say that I have seen much worse in my lifetime. Affleck stars as Larry Gigli, a low level hood who is assigned a mission to kidnap the mentally challenged son (Justin Bartha) of a district attorney. When he arrives to pick up the young adult-ish Brian, he runs into his new partner, Ricki (Lopez), a sassy lesbian whom didn’t know she had a partner in the assignment and neither did Gigli. Uh-oh! He’s a piggish, male chauvinist and she’s a bitchy man hater- combined with a silly ol’ retard and this is going to make for one crazy road trip! (Wherever they’re going). Sure enough, an unlikely love story develops between Gigli and Ricki (leading up to “gobble, gobble”) and they also both grow attached to the lovable and dim Brian, who thinks the whole time that they are driving to the “Baywatch”. At a minute over the two hour mark it’s a wonder what anyone was thinking. Editing this down to ninety minutes or so and a couple of re-writes and maybe, just maybe this might have worked. After all director Martin Brest isn’t Uwe Boll. He’s an Oscar nominee for “Scent of a Woman” and he directed the Brad Pitt starring remake of “Meet Joe Black” that remains unseen by me, but everyone else seems to love. So what went wrong? Way too much press backfired (the other “Bennifer” movie, Kevin Smith’s “Jersey Girl” also bombed commercially and critically)? Did Brest give himself a script that just wasn’t workable (his first script since 1979)? I say that it’s just a mess all around. The all too brief cameos from Christopher Walken and Al Pacino bring so much to the table in this film, that in a normal movie it would just be considered scenes featuring them- here their scenes are the movie. Gobble, Gobble.