John Travolta is an iconic actor, but his career has taken various twists and turns. The actor rose to stardom in the 1970s when he played a role in the television series Welcome Back, Kotter. His TV fame helped land him his iconic role in the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever, playing smooth-dancing Tony Manero. Soon, Travolta portrayed an equally notable role in the musical Grease as the leading male love interest, Danny Zuko. Travolta has been nominated for two Academy Awards for Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction.

Despite his status as an Academy Award nominee, Travolta has had plenty of misses in his career. The actor has had multiple movies score a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, including Look Who’s Talking Now, Speed Kills, The Poison Rose, Staying Alive, and Life on the Line. While these scores were particularly lacking, he boasts a whole additional host of тιтles with single-digit scores, including Battlefield Earth (3%) and Old Dogs (5%). Now, one of Travolta’s 0% movies gets its accuracy evaluated by an expert.

Gotti Is Surprisingly Accurate

However, The Movie Bombed At The Box Office

Gotti has now been analyzed for accuracy by an actual former mobster. The 2018 true-crime biopic tells the true story of the тιтular mob boss John Gotti (Travolta) and his relationship with his son (Spencer Rocco Lofranco). Gotti also featured Kelly Preston, Stacy Keach, Leo Rossi, and William DeMeo. The film was panned by critics, leading to a 0% Tomatometer on Rotten Tomatoes. The mob movie was also a box office flop, getting just $6.4 million worldwide on an estimated budget of $10 million.

Speaking with Insider, former mobster Anthony Ruggiano Jr. rates Gotti for accuracy. He began by explaining John Gotti’s background and what happened in the actual murder of Paul Castellano. Looking more specifically at the Travolta film, he praised the setup of the scene, noting how the Gottis would “hide in plain sight‘ and how all hits would involve “crash cars” and multiple people for protection. Overall, he gave the Castellano murder scene an 8 out of 10 for accuracy. Check out the full quote from Ruggiano below:

So this is when John Gotti put out the hit on Paul Castellano in front of Sparks restaurant. Paul Castellano was the boss of the Gambino family and John Gotti at the time was a captain. This was all over the rule that you couldn’t set drugs, because John Gotti’s brother Gene and his partner Angelo Quack Quack got arrested. And there was a lot of wire taps involved. And Paul wanted to listen to the wire tops, and John and Angelo and Gene weren’t going to let him listen to the wire taps because they would have got killed. He never got approval, you weren’t allowed to kill bosses. He broke every rule in the book.

Hide in plain sight. You know what I mean. It’s the busiest, nobody’s paying attention to six guys that have Russian hats on an overcoats, that all look the same. Just a lot of things going on, nobody’s paying attention, it’s just a lot of action. So when it happens, it’s just so many things going on, that you know, you just disappear into the movements.

John Gotti actually watched the murder occur from up the block with Sammy The Bull and actually drove by the murder scene to make sure he was ᴅᴇᴀᴅ. And Sammy had a gun on him and they drove by and actually looked at the bodies and just kept on going.

My father told me when he did hits for Albert Anastasia, sometimes Albert Anastasia who was the boss, would be like in one of the crash cars. There’s always more than one person, even if one person goes in to do the hit, there’s people outside in crash cars. Crash cars are your protection. So there’s always going to be people watching the hit. You’re never going to be alone.

I would give this an 8. That’s exactly how it went down. This is a very personal thing to me, because I was very very close to John Gotti. And, I haven’t watched this whole movie because I can’t get past the fact that John Travolta played John Gotti.

What This Means For Gotti

Gotti At Least Has One Redeeming Quality

Ruggiano Jr.’s generous accuracy rating shows that there is actually something redeemable about Gotti. While its closeness to the facts does not necessarily equate to the movie’s overall competence, it is worth something that the film attempted to have some historical accuracy. Whether Travolta did an authentic job portraying the mobster on screen is a different question, but the screenplay does at least make an effort to capture real events close to how they actually occurred.

Source: Insider