Every few weeks for the foreseeable future, Vulture will be selecting one film to watch as part of our Friday Night Movie Club.
Its story is both myopic and convoluted, centered on a titular low-level Mafia member — that’s Ben Affleck — who kidnaps a developmentally disabled young man whom Affleck successfully tries to seduce.
The tonal tension extends to genre: The film is ostensibly a romantic comedy, and though Lopez and Affleck are supposed to be professional mob enforcers, they eschew violence, which makes it especially jarring when another character shoots someone in the head and the camera jumps to a close-up of tropical fish eating freshly blown-out brains.
Gigli is a time capsule of the The parents of the cicadas driving you insane this summer hadn’t emerged from the ground when this movie was shot.
Like the plot of Gigli, Affleck and Lopez never quite made sense; a year after Gigli came out, they broke up, subsequently marrying partners with whom they had children.