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Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
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Gigli
Sony Pictures Entertainment / Columbia Pictures
FILM:
MPAA RATING: R for sexual content, pervasive language and brief strong violence
Starring
Ben Affleck,
Jennifer Lopez,
Al Pacino,
Christopher Walken,
Justin Bartha,
Lainie Kazan,
and
Missy Crider
In this unconventional romantic comedy, low-level hood Larry Gigli (Affleck) is given an assignment that gets him in way over his head and Ricki (Lopez), a gorgeous free spirited female enforcer is sent in to assist him. (Sony)
| GENRE(S): |
Romance
|
| WRITTEN BY: |
Martin Brest
|
| DIRECTED BY: |
Martin Brest
|
| RELEASE DATE: |
DVD: December 9, 2003
Video: December 9, 2003
Theatrical: August 1, 2003
|
| RUNNING TIME: |
minutes, Color |
| ORIGIN: |
USA |
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
63
Chicago Sun-Times
Roger Ebert
Lopez and Affleck are sweet and appealing in their performances; the buzz said they didn't have chemistry, but the buzz was wrong. What they don't have is conviction.
58
Entertainment Weekly
Owen Gleiberman
A watchable bad movie, but it's far from your typical cookie-cutter blockbuster. There are no shoot-outs or car chases, and there isn't much romantic suspense, either.
50
Variety
Amy Dawes
Arrives carrying more baggage than a Greyhound bus, which may distract moviegoers from what is a silly but still an enjoyably written and performed romantic comedy.
50
ReelViews
James Berardinelli
Some of the dialogue is astonishingly awful. Sex and relationships are constantly likened to animal interaction.
50
Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
For the most part I was able to accept this thesis and enjoy Lopez in her usual superwoman role, but the script does get awfully preachy in spots.
40
Salon.com
Charles Taylor
Turns out to be merely bad -- not a train wreck, not the crime against humanity it's been rumored to be.
40
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Keith Phipps
Writer-director Martin Brest lends the film a professional sheen, and his stars (who some rumors suggest may have become romantically involved) have charisma to spare, but the film has all the charge and momentum of a Paxil ad.
38
Charlotte Observer
Lawrence Toppman
After five minutes, Christopher Walken vanishes. We wait vainly for the next 90 minutes for someone, anyone to bring that kind of danger, unpredictability and vitality to a story as drab as army fatigues.
33
Portland Oregonian
Kim Morgan
Has a curious train-wreck quality to it that keeps you watching and thinking. (Even if you are thinking things like, Why were these lines ever written? When you hear the "turkey" line, your jaw will drop.)
30
Village Voice
Michael Atkinson
Gigli berates, insults, dismisses, throttles, and bellows at Bartha's meticulously aped retard, and then turns sensitive and warm—it's hard to decide which attitude is more insulting.
30
Dallas Observer
Luke Y. Thompson
So how bad, in the final analysis, is Gigli? The best that can be said is that it doesn't beat out "The Ladies Man" as the most abrasively awful film of the past five years, nor does it top "Battlefield Earth" for sheer misguided lunacy.
25
USA Today
Claudia Puig
An embarrassing debacle...the rare movie that never seems to take off, but also never seems to end. It tries hard to titillate, but ends up making audiences want to avert their eyes.
25
Chicago Tribune
Mark Caro
Put together enough pointless, random details, and you get Gigli, a movie that's less incompetent than bewildering.
25
Philadelphia Inquirer
Steven Rea
Affleck, for his part, behaves as if a Zero from "Pearl Harbor" dropped one too close to his noggin. He looks permanently shell-shocked.
25
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Liam Lacey
A hypnotic, black hole of a movie that sucks reputations, careers and goodwill down its vortex. Rarely has a movie that doesn't star Madonna achieved such a skin-crawling mixture of deluded preening and bungled humour.
25
New York Post
Jonathan Foreman
The problem with Gigli is that it is an inept attempt to do Elmore Leonard by Martin Brest, a filmmaker whose coarse sensibility makes him catastrophically unqualified to the task.
25
Baltimore Sun
Michael Sragow
Excruciating...The movie proves to be singularly unfunny and static almost from the non-get-go. Virtually nothing happens; the movie is all premise.
25
New York Daily News
Jami Bernard
Gigli is a disaster.
25
Rolling Stone
Peter Travers
The only people likely to get a kick out of Gigli -- the first screen teaming of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez -- are Madonna and her director hubby Guy Ritchie. Finally there's a movie as jaw-droppingly awful as their "Swept Away."
25
Miami Herald
Rene Rodriguez
Gigli's awfulness is of a rarer, more precious variety. It's the sort of bizarre, ill-conceived picture you can't believe exists, but are secretly glad it does.
25
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Sean Axmaker
There is no histrionic excess or crackpot camp, only hoary sentiment, the puppy-dog cuteness of the mentally handicapped, and the proposition that the "cure" for lesbianism is one good man brave enough to get in touch with his inner cow.
20
TV Guide
Maitland McDonagh
The spectacle of the near-naked Ricki (Lopez) striking sexually provocative yoga poses while floridly extolling the virtues of female genitalia is particularly mortifying, but it's only one of many horribly miscalculated scenes.
20
The New York Times
Dana Stevens
Buried in the slow, talky, inanities that the two stars exchange are some potentially interesting ideas about female sexual self-assertion and male surrender, but neither the actors nor the filmmakers have any notion about how to explore them.
20
Film Threat
David Grove
Has no story, no redeeming characters that anyone could care about, and the actors are all on autopilot, completely soaked with their own vanity.
20
Washington Post
Desson Thomson
Guys, I'm telling you: Don't go to this movie! It's "Chasing Amy" with guns! You're walking into a trap! This is for fans of the holy couple, but they already know that.
20
LA Weekly
Ella Taylor
How fortunate that the J. Lo bod, majestic butt and all, finds itself in excellent working order in Gigli: There is precious little other consolation in this formless windbag of a romantic comedy.
20
Los Angeles Times
Manohla Dargis
Nearly as unwatchable as it is unpronounceable.
20
Slate
David Edelstein
The movie is bafflingly boring and ridiculous. Its loginess is exacerbated by the pacing of the writer-director, Martin Brest.
20
The Hollywood Reporter
Kirk Honeycutt
The film lacks a controlling point of view to guide an audience through so improbable a tale. Nothing in the movie is funny -- aside from giggles provoked by misfired jokes -- or romantic or dramatic.
11
Austin Chronicle
Kimberley Jones
Wretched. And while the dirtiest, low-rottenest part of me wouldn’t mind watching the institution of Ben/Jen get reamed, the heft of the blame should be shouldered by Hollywood vet Martin Brest, who wrote an incoherent, incompetent script and further mangled it with his direction.
10
Newsweek
Jeff Giles
After the schadenfreudian thrill of watching beautiful people humiliate themselves wears off, it has the same annihilating effect on your will to live.
10
Film Threat
Kevin Carr
It’s just a mess.
0
Wall Street Journal
Joe Morgenstern
The worst movie -- all right, the worst allegedly major movie -- of our admittedly young century. More stupefying follies may come, but it's impossible to imagine how they'll beat this one for staggering idiocy, fatuousness or pretension.
0
San Francisco Chronicle
Mick LaSalle
The most thoroughly joyless and inept film of the year, and one of the worst of the decade. We're talking about a disaster, and not of the fun "Showgirls" variety, either.
0
Boston Globe
Ty Burr
An overlong, joyless, and inconsequential affair, full of dead air, and possessing only a few moments of jaw-dropping bad taste. It's a dull disaster.
0
Premiere
Laine Ewen
Uncomfortable, offensive, and boring.
0
Washington Post
Stephen Hunter
Enervated, torpid, slack, dreary and, oh yes, nasty, brutish and long.
 The average user rating for this movie is 2.3 (out of 10) based on 84 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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