It has been 19 years since the Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez film Gigli was released in theaters. Life has changed a lot for them since then, at least at first glance. For one thing, Affleck and Lopez broke up. Lopez married Marc Anthony while Affleck married Jennifer Garner; Lopez had fraternal twins with Anthony and Affleck had two daughters and a son with Garner. Lopez and Anthony parted ways, and she performed with Alex Rodriguez; then Affleck and Garner broke up, and he started dating a Saturday Night Live producer. Lopez and Rodriguez separated after five years together, and Lopez and Affleck reunited and married. As the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Let’s just hope the newlyweds don’t get it into their heads that acting in a movie again is a good idea, because Gigli was a total disaster, criticized at the time. In fact, it was more than swept away – it was trashed. Rotten Tomatoes rates the film at 6%, and it only made $4 million at the box office in its opening weekend; when all is said and done, Gigli grossed just under $6.1 million at the domestic box office and $7.3 million worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo. Gigli cost $54 million to manufacture. Producers and distributors lost a combined $46 million on his bet on the star power of the “It Couple” of the moment.
Why has he Gigli bomb so badly?
Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez’s relationship was overexposed
Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez met and started dating while filming Gigli. By the time the film was released in 2003, they were so completely overexposed that it hurt the film. Everywhere you turned to the media (TV, print, digital) you couldn’t escape the coverage of them and their relationship and their PDAs, red carpet appearances, etc. To put it simply, audiences were sick of seeing Affleck and Lopez throwing their love in their faces left, right and center.
The director was no good for Gigli
Gigli was directed by Martin Brest. At the time, he was a renowned director with Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run, Women’s Perfume, and Meet Joe Black on his resume, leading stars like Eddie Murphy, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Brad Pitt. There was no reason to think that Brest could not deliver a blow with Gigli. However, he seems to have wandered off during the filming of the film. It is billed as a romantic comedy detective film. There’s no romance or comedy in Gigli.
The script is convoluted, ridiculous and poorly executed
The premise of Gigli is strange, to say the least. Larry Gigli (Ben Affleck) is a low-ranking Los Angeles mobster who is ordered by his boss to kidnap a boy named Brian, the mentally handicapped son of a federal prosecutor, so the mob can use the boy as currency. exchange to rescue their mafia boss from prison. Larry convinces Brian to accompany him by promising to take him Baywatch, which Brian is obsessed with. However, Larry’s bosses don’t trust him to pull this off, so they assign a woman named Ricki (Jennifer Lopez) to watch over him.
Larry is attracted to Ricki and irritated that he has to take orders from a woman and downright pissed that she is a lesbian. Larry and Ricki are ordered to cut off Brian’s thumb, which neither of them wants to do. Then, Ricki’s ex-girlfriend Robin shows up upset to see her with a man and attempts to kill herself by cutting her wrists. Larry and Ricki rush her to the hospital where Larry sneaks into the morgue to cut off a thumbs up to send to his boss claiming it’s Brian’s. Larry and Ricki return to his apartment. He confesses his love to her. They have sex.
The storyline doesn’t become believable or sensible from there.
Gigli was cast incorrectly
When Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez were cast as Gigli, they were stars still in the early and middle stages of their careers. Affleck was not believable as a gangster, not at all. Neither Affleck nor Lopez had any experience leading romantic comedies (although soon after Lopez would go on to dominate that genre with The wedding planner and a series of romantic comedy hits). Despite the actual relationship of the couples, in Gigli Affleck and Lopez had no chemistry at all. The film might have been saved by casting two different leads – say, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie (whose spark ignited Mr and Mrs Smith) like Larry and Ricki.
The Gigli script was awful
Martin Brest not only directed Gigli, he also wrote the screenplay. However, the blame does not rest solely with him. During filming, the production company, Revolution Studios, stepped in and took creative control of Brest and significantly rewrote and remade the film. No one will ever know if Brest’s original script would have been better than the rewritten one. But the resulting mess is widely considered one of the worst movies of all time.
Brest had a successful and flourishing career before Gigli. He has not directed, written or produced a film since. In 2014, Playboy Magazine noted that Brest had completely left public life after Gigli’s disastrous reception and service. However, he briefly resurfaced in 2021 as a featured guest at a screening of Beverly Hills Cop and midnight race in Los Angeles.
No one could understand what Gigli was talking about
Many films are made that are critically acclaimed and still make respectable numbers at the box office. Many movies are box office bombs and later find near-cult adoration in rentals and streaming. None of these things happened to Gigli. Why? Well, between the overexposure of every Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez move, the creative chaos that took place between Brest and the studio, and the overall mess of the story, audiences couldn’t figure out what this movie was about, and the deceptive movie trailers didn’t help.
Was it a novel? Not really, because the chemistry is so dead here, not to mention that a straight man who professes his love to a lesbian who then sleeps with him is so unromantic it gets awful. Was it a comedy? There is not a single laugh in this film. Was it a crime drama or a thriller of sorts? In the premise only, but barely in the execution. So what was it Gigli really about? Only Martin Brest knows, and he doesn’t talk about it (or anything else, really).