Gigli

From my childhood I remember reading a story by Harry Harrison entitled Spell of Magic featuring a character named Merlo the Magician. He chased some stolen diamonds or something, but the part that stuck with me was a surgical tool he wore inside the waistband of his pants for emergencies. This was a stiff length of wire with notches placed in it. The tool is apparently used by surgeons and is called a Gigli Saw. It’s good for cutting swiftly through bone and flesh… which is what this film does in reverse. Cuts through bone and flesh.

But agonisingly slowly.

Ben Affleck, mildly attractive as he is, is a crap gangster. He is crap at convincing us he is one, crap at performing the duties associated with being one, and crap at appearing in the least bit threatening. He isn’t crap at appearing lumbering and slow-witted though. That part is very convincing.

Here he plays Larry Gigli (it rhymes with really), a hardarse freelancer whose commitment to being a hardarse is growing ever slimmer day by day. When he is told to retrieve a mentally challenged young man named Brian and hold him at his house, he does so, eager to please his psychotic boss. Enter Jennifer Lopez (J-Lo) as Rikki – another smug thug there to make sure Larry doesn’t stuff up.

"Must be Mental Illness Week…"

In the interminable lengthy scenes that follow where nothing much happens continually for big chunks of time, we learn a little bit more about Larry (played by B-Af), much more about Rikki and occasionally a reason these three are in this apartment together. It seems the boy, Brian, is the brother of a defense prosecutor and attempting to have some charges for something dropped, they are to sever Brian’s thumb and ship it express to the prosecutor. However, pussy-whipped Larry, having become quite smitten with lesbian Rikki, opts out and soon the heavies are after them all.

Not a bad premise for the first 15 minutes of a movie, setting us up for an all in action pursuit flick. Unfortunately though, what should be 15 minutes is actually drawn out painfully into the entire 116 minutes of this film. Like I said, cutting through bone, just really, really slowly.

J-Lo’s appeal as the sexy lesbian withers from beginning to end so that before the film is out, the only one doing any decent acting is the kid playing retarded Brian. He certainly has more charisma than Affleck hands down. Christopher Walken (C-Walk) steps in and out of the film so effortlessly and needlessly, it’s a desperate shame to see him leave and not return. Al Pacino (Al-Po) plays a fabulous role as a gangster who is actually frightening, but again is here for so short a time as to leave us weeping. Scrub Affleck out, put in Walken v Pacino and now we got a film.

Alas, this is but a dream. The film is slow, the action so limited as to be basically non-existent and the story sucks. It’s no wonder this film died on the table in cinemas. I couldn’t even figure out why it is named after this weak protagonist. He sucks. But he does grate on us. Then on bone. Then it’s raw bone and bone. Then the limb falls off. Roll credits.

What a beautiful way to show an empty building. Perfect picture, perfect transfer and a perfectly clear day artefact-wise. Maybe they still had lots of unwatched clean prints left for the transfer still sitting in the cans at the distributors? Plenty of good lighting, clean night shots, good shadow detail and true colours.

The usual adage of crap film, clean transfer holds true again.

Again, nearly perfect but for one fault; the music. This sounds like the soundtrack to On Golden Pond or Love Story or something. Sometimes, it even descends into Full House-like saccharine emotion stuff. Truly nauseating and an embarrassment. Nice work, John Powell.

Given us in Dolby Digital 5.1 the roaming channels do sod all, but they’ve got nothing to do anyway. It’s all bloody endless yapping between J-Lo and B-Af. Even the sex scene seems tacked in. As if a hardarse lesbian would be turned by B-Af with his shirt off. Cheesus. The best part of this ceaseless dialogue is in Brian’s fixation with an Australian weather report. He runs up all B-Af’s phone bills, God bless him, and is a better actor too.

Four trailers for crap films. Gigli, Anaconda, Maid in Manhattan and Mona Lisa Smile, which in truth I haven’t seen in order to be qualified to call it crap, but the title’s crap so it counts.

The Dolby Space trailer makes an appearance, and for an extra bonus, read the hilarious lines written in the pink tape across the cover. Already, out of date. Ha ha ha.

Gigli does rhyme with really. The film is Gigli boring, Gigli badly scripted and Gigli crap. There’s no Gigli good story and there’s Gigli nothing here on offer other than J-Lo stripped down to snug-fitting lycra and doing yoga for ten minutes while she waxes lyrical about how natural lesbianism is. After being paired up with B-Af, I’d consider it too.

If I was a girl.