Finally, Gotti’s shabby aesthetic and narrative shortcomings are outweighed by its more drastically questionable moral ones. Connolly’s film may be the first mainstream mafia biopic to overtly take the underworld’s side in its rise-and-fall story: a sympathetic stance was to be expected given that it’s adapted from Gotti Jr’s own self-published memoir, but it’s still somewhat startling to see the film-makers fully buying their subject’s account of events, from its portrayal of Gotti as a doting family man, the bulk of whose criminal acts are kept off-screen, to its chastisement of the government for alleged ill-treatment of the Gottis during their respective trials, to an inadvertently hilarious closing montage of real-life supporters singing the Don’s praises (“Everybody knows he was a good man”). And that’s before our man Pitbull conclusively raps his praises as the credits roll: “Dapper Don / I called him Dad / Giant in my eyes / Legend of a man”. If a certain other contentiously powerful New Yorker is commissioning a biopic any time soon, he might want to check this out – Travolta as Trump, anyone?

Likewise, one of the most interesting, and perhaps telling, episodes of the John Gotti saga was the time his neighbor, John Favara, hit Gotti’s son Frank with his car and killed the boy. The death was ruled accidental and Favara tried to apologize but was allegedly threatened, beaten, kidnapped, and disappeared. According to some, he was dissolved in acid. Even the guy who witnessed Favara’s kidnapping had to sell his diner and skip town. The incident says a lot about what it must’ve been like to live near a guy like John Gotti — imagine being anyone who had to bring him bad news — but in the film, the entire story is relayed via an old news report, the ultimate example of telling rather than showing. We don’t get to see any of it, but we do get an inexplicable scene of Victoria Gotti breaking furniture in a room off-screen, and another of John Gotti crying to an associate “He was 12 yeahs old! He didn’t even have hair on his prick!”

One of Gotti‘s few recognizable through lines is that John Gotti Jr. (played by Spencer Lofranco) is actually a great guy, which is probably not surprising for a film whose production began with the purchase of Gotti Jr’s life rights. A biopic told from the clearly biased perspective of whichever surviving real-life figure participated in it is nothing new (Straight Outta Compton and All Eyez On Me also come to mind) but the phenomenon reaches new heights of transparency in Gotti. The movie, which had previously been about John Gotti Sr. (ostensibly) in the last 10 minutes turns into the saga of John Jr’s unfair treatment at the hands of the US justice system. “The government were the real gangsters,” Victoria Gotti says, exegetically.

It’s one of Gotti‘s many emblematic lines, describing something we never actually saw happen and delivering a statement that doesn’t actually mean anything but sounds vaguely profound to a dumb person. He showed the world who’s boss!