Entertainment

New Low For Jen And Ben?

By Dan Collins

August 1, 2003 / 9:19 AM EDT / CBS

"Gigli," the new Ben Affleck-Jennifer Lopez star vehicle, opened in theaters nationwide Friday to a resounding chorus of Bronx cheers from the movie critics.

Here's a sampling of opinion from some of the nation's newspapers:

Wall Street Journal: "'Gigli' ... is the worst movie - all right, the worst allegedly major movie - of our admittedly young century."

Washington Post: "Ben and Jen? After seeing 'Gigli,' I think Ben and Jerry could make a better movie. "Gigli" is certainly bereft of low pleasures: It's both giggle-free and jiggle-free. Worse, it's enervated, torpid, slack, dreary and, oh yes, nasty, brutish and long."

USA Today: "'Gigli' is the rare movie that never seems to take off, but also never seems to end. It tries hard to titillate, but ends up making audiences want to avert their eyes."

The New York Times calls the movie "a hopelessly misconceived exercise in celebrity self-worship, which opens to nationwide ridicule today."

Here's what happens: Affleck plays an incompetent mob thug named Larry Gigli. (That's pronounced JEE-lee, which rhymes with really, a running joke that isn't particularly funny the first time.)

Gigli is asked to kidnap Brian (Justin Bartha), the mentally disabled younger brother of a federal prosecutor who's going after a New York mobster (Al Pacino).

His boss, however, thinks he's incapable of handling the assignment alone and sends in Ricki (Lopez), another mob contractor who also happens to be a lesbian, to help Affleck.

But J.Lo doesn't stay lesbian for long. The consensus choice for worst moment of the movie comes when Lopez beckons Affleck into foreplay by lying in bed and purring, "It's turkey time. Gobble, gobble."

The bad publicity surrounding the movie has already prompted Affleck and Lopez to swear that they will never work with one another again.

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