Gigli (2003)

This review is sponsored by

BUY IT

General		Extras
Category	Drama	Dolby Digital Trailer-stars Theatrical Trailer Trailer-Anaconda, Maid In Manhattan, Mona Lisa Smile
Rating
Year Of Production	2003
Running Time	116:25
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (60:58)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	2,4,5	Directed By	Martin Brest
Studio Distributor	Sony Pictures Home Entertain	Starring	Ben Affleck Terry Camilleri David Backus Lenny Venito Robert Silver Luis Alberto Martínez Justin Bartha Jennifer Lopez Christopher Walken Todd Giebenhain Brian Sites Brian Casey Les Bradford
Case	?
RPI	$36.95	Music	John Powell

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) Hungarian Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) Russian Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	2.40:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	2.35:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English Arabic Bulgarian Croatian Czech Greek Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Polish Russian Slovenian Turkish English for the Hearing Impaired	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    Gigli has received a fairly poor reception. It has been described as the worst film of 2003, and an exercise in pandering to the egos of the two leads. I don't think it's that bad, but I can see why they say that.

    The plot is simple enough. Larry Gigli (Ben Affleck) is a thug, working as an enforcer for a loan shark called Louis (Lenny Venito). Louis is worried about his boss (a cameo by Al Pacino), who has been arrested and charged by a federal prosecutor. Louis instructs Larry to kidnap Brian (Justin Bartha), the prosecutor's mentally-challenged brother. But Louis doesn't trust Larry to get it right, so he sends another "contractor", this one a gay woman (Jennifer Lopez) who identifies herself as "Ricki", but admits shortly afterwards that it isn't her real name. So now we have the two of them minding Brian, and the stage is set for the (very conventional) conflict between two people working together.

    There are some speeches in this script that ring horribly false. The language is frequently coarse. I wonder if the script was originally written for someone like Eddie Murphy — he could have pulled off the speeches about being "the gangster's gangster" better than Ben Affleck, for example.

    Jennifer Lopez is a lot more threatening in Enough. She is just not credible as an "enforcer" in this film. And she wears a ridiculous amount of jewellery for a woman who is supposed to be ready to get physical. She could have been right for this part if the script let her.

    Ben Affleck is a lot more credible as a man lusting after a lesbian in Chasing Amy. In this film his performance is spotty, with his apparent intelligence seeming to rise and fall between scenes. I don't think it's his fault, though — I think it's more the fault of the script, and he has been mis-cast for the part.

    This film isn't all bad, but there are some sorry bits. The whole of Christopher Walken's cameo is poor for example (he looks horribly ill), as is Missy Crider's scene (how did she find them?). And there are some (mercifully brief) gruesome moments, one involving a plastic take-away food knife, the other a fish tank. One wonders if the gruesome moments were attempts to make this a black comedy.

    All in all, this film feels as though the writer/director (Martin Brest) was indecisive, and unable to choose what kind of film he was making. He has written pieces of a romantic comedy, pieces of a black comedy, and pieces of a gangster comedy, but unfortunately he has assembled them all into the one film, and it just doesn't work. So, although I very much doubt that this is the worst film of 2003, I can see why it has been described that way.

Video

    There's a saying that the worst movies get the best transfers. You won't disprove that theory with this disc...

    This movie is presented in an aspect ratio of 2.40:1, 16x9 enhanced. Given that the film was shot in Panavision, that's either close to, or exactly, the intended aspect ratio.

    The image is sharp and clear throughout. Shadow detail is quite good. There's what looks like light film grain occasionally, but it never reaches a level that makes it definite. There's no low-level noise.

    Colour is fine. There are some nice rich colours, and they are well-rendered. There are no colour-related artefacts.

    There are a couple of tiny film artefacts, but you have to watch closely to see them. However, you don't have to look closely to notice a strange flickering in the background every so often. Strangely, it occurs most often on Ben Affleck's end of a conversation shot over-the-shoulder. Have a look at the backgrounds of 7:40, 31:41, and 97:03.

    There's no significant aliasing, no moiré, and no sign of an MPEG artefact, except for some light background shimmer.

    Subtitles are provided in thirteen languages, including English, plus English captions. I watched the English captions, and they seem to be reasonably accurate; they are coded with a solid black background, so they are more than usually noticeable when they trespass into the picture area (a lot of the time they lie in the black bar below the picture). Interestingly, one of the other languages is Russian, which is is something we don't often see, because Russia is in Region 5; then again, this disc is coded for regions 2, 4, and 5.

    The disc is single-sided, RSDL. The layer change is at 60:58, and is noticeable even though it falls on a break between scenes.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    There are only three soundtracks in the unusual choices of English, Russian, and Hungarian. I only listened to the English (I left my Russian and Hungarian language skills in my other jacket). The English soundtrack is Dolby Digital 5.1 at 448kbps.

    Dialogue is easy to understand most of the time; occasionally the swearing got awfully rapid, especially in the first third of the film. Audio sync is no problem.

    The score is from John Powell, and it is a bit overstated, a bit too obvious — there were times when it felt like the movie score equivalent of a (bad) stand-up comedian's "boom-tish" on a punch-line.

    The surrounds are used quite subtly — they are engaged mostly for score, but not for directional effects. The subwoofer gets little to do, but it does get used.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

    The main menu is static and silent, with shots of the film as backgrounds. It does the job, but it looks rather obviously like a low-budget effort.

Theatrical Trailer (2:20)

    This trailer is not too deceptive (although it features footage not in the movie), but it makes no mention at all of the fact that "Ricki" is gay. An interesting omission, and one that makes the film look a lot more like a romantic comedy.

Trailers

    The only other extras we get are three more trailers:

• Anaconda (1:53) — a film with Jennifer Lopez
• Maid in Manhattan (2:21) — another film starring Jennifer Lopez
• Mona Lisa Smile (2:21) — a film starring Julia Roberts, Julia Stiles, and Kirsten Dunst (and not Jennifer Lopez!)

    The Region 1 version of this disc was released at the end of 2003 (given that the film premiered in July 2003, it couldn't be a lot earlier). As far as I can tell, it has a similar minimal presentation, with nothing worthwhile in the way of extras. Although IMDb claims the R1 DVD has only a Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack, other reports have it as 5.1, so even that it is the same. I'm calling this a draw — if you want this film, feel free to get it from either region with confidence.

    A movie that has been heavily slated, given a good transfer to DVD.

    The video quality is very good.

    The audio quality is quite good.

    The extras are basic.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall