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  • Bile Fascination: The film's infamous 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes certainly warrants this.
  • Cliché Storm: The film has been criticized for showcasing many of the clichés of mob movies without doing anything new at all. Drink every time you see one that appeared in an older and better movie, and take a double shot every time that movie was GoodFellas.
  • Critical Dissonance: The marketing team attempted to trade on this, only for it to turn out that a lot of the positive audience reviews left on Rotten Tomatoes were due to astroturfing.
  • Designated Hero: Bizarrely, the filmmakers' sympathies seem to be entirely with Gotti, even though he's still a ruthless mafia don who murders, bribes, or threatens anyone who opposes him, and treats the government as the bad guys because they tried to prosecute him... for crimes of which he was entirely guilty, a fact that the movie does very little to hide.
  • Memetic Mutation: After the film's abject critical and commercial failure and subsequent notorious Dear Negative Reader campaign accusing critics of "putting out the hit", the film picked up an ironic following online where it's jokingly treated as the greatest film of all time.
  • Overshadowed by Controversy: The film would have already gone down in infamy as a member of the "0% on Rotten Tomatoes" club, but then the crew made it even worse with their bizarre claims that the savage reviews were actually due to a conspiracy among the critic elite and even rebranding it as "the movie critics don't want you to see", all while never giving the slightest explanation of what the point of such a conspiracy would be, particularly as the film wasn't screened in advance for critics.
  • Took the Bad Film Seriously: John Travolta put some serious effort into portraying John Gotti and is the only one who appeared to be taking the film seriously at all.
  • Unintentionally Unsympathetic: A lot of the movie seems to be based on the idea that John Gotti is a Neighbourhood-Friendly Gangster who was unfairly jailed by The Man, except that as far as the audience can tell, Gotti is entirely guilty of the charges against him, and is shown casually murdering people on a pretty regular basis. It also doesn't help that the actual John Gotti basically escaped his charges less through covering his tracks or being beloved by the community, and more through threatening and bribing witnesses a lot.
  • WTH, Costuming Department?:
    • The film's attempts to age John Gotti Jr. up amount to... simply giving him a pair of glasses and nothing else.
    • Travolta portrays Gotti with makeup to make him appear older. Travolta at the time of filming was 2 years older than John Gotti was when he died.

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