Gigli

REVIEW
Affleck, tattooed and chesty, plays low-level Mafia goombah Larry Gigli (rhymes, we're told repeatedly, with really). He's charged by his snarly boss to kidnap the autistic brother of a prosecutor in the hopes that the feds will ease off the Big Don, but Gigli is a screw-up, so his boss assigns another "pro" to keep an eye on them — Ricki (Lopez), a curvaceous freelancer/hit woman who immediately arouses Gigli's loins. Alas, she's a lesbian and is not only immune to the big galoot's throbbing buffoonishness, she playfully taunts him into second-guessing his own overexaggerated masculinity. Eventually they screw. Meanwhile the brain-damaged abductee rambles on about "Baywatch" and old-school rap music and occasionally gets frightened and bursts forth with a Tourettic spout of vulgarities. All of this, mind you, is supposed to play for light yuks and chuckles. No, really. Naturally, Gigli sees himself as the one guy able to melt through Ricki's icy wall of sexual indifference, but the script's singular inventive notion concerns Ricki's reverse seduction of Gigli: The hetero-hunk doesn’t "score" the lesbian so much as the lesbian responds favorably towards the closet queer's suppressed femininity; i.e., she's attracted to the woman in him. Which would make Gigli the slyest, most subversive lesbian love story ever told were it not that its leading man/dyke is too shallow/oblivious to wade into these waters ... and were it not for the painful fact that the movie is just plain crass, tasteless and dreadfully unfunny.