As empty as a faux leather pouch and as useless as a pasta pencil, The Gucci house is a silly comedy that makes Chef Boyardee and the Super Mario Brothers look like nuanced Italian characters. At least isn’t director Ridley Scott’s second terrible, horrible, not good, very bad second film of the year his worst of 2021? This tells you everything you need to know about The last duel.

Positioned as a mixture between The Godfather and The devil wears Prada, GucciThe excesses and disorder have been explained as intentional. Because people just can’t stop finding ways to give old white “authors” the benefit of the doubt. The truth is, it’s just plain bad. And stupid. And long. Any combo of two of them can work, but hitting that winning trifecta earns you a cinematic fart.

Lady Gaga’s eyeballs embody Patrizia Reggiani, while the rest of her body is also present. When Patrizia meets Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver) at a party, she sees the gentle bespectacled giant as her ticket to a better life. The two immediately begin to awkwardly flirt, as if they were two aliens trapped in human bodies, faking a mating ritual they had read on the planet Klorp. In no time, and it’s not a phrase that is often said about a 160-minute film, the couple announce their intention to have the mambo wedding. This infuriates Gucci’s patriarch Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons), who exiles his only son from the family business.

This company is run by Rodolfo and his brother, Aldo (Al Pacino). They can’t agree on how to run the business any more than Irons or Pacino can agree on what an Italian accent should look like. Aldo also struggles with his son, Paolo (Jared Leto), but not as much as those of us who have to live on the same planet at the same time as Jared Leto. Patrizia sees an opening, and with the guidance of a television psychic (Salma Hayek), she tries to convince her husband Iago to split the family and claim the Gucci throne.

Sounds pretty interesting, right? Perhaps that’s because the synopsis leaves out all the exciting talk of tax evasion, the endless scenes of Gaga’s contortionist eyebrows, and the insanely disconnected performances. Gaga, Pacino, and Leto star in three totally different films, none of them good, all feeling fueled by old-fashioned anti-Italian American racism. Driver is quietly spectacular again, even though his passage in the third act from silly tits to cowardly morons comes out of nowhere.

This is the thing about Gucci House: Despite its bloated and boring length, it spends so much time. It skips or deduces hugely important stuff and more compelling story elements in favor of drone shots of ski resorts and close-ups of Leto’s distracting makeup job. No matter how much Gaga screams and gestures, the dissolution of Patrizia and Maurizio’s partnership doesn’t seem like a reward for well-planned scenes. Everything moves forward and heads towards a strangely hasty end.

And as with The last duel, a question of finality hangs over the whole. If it’s supposed to be a mafia parody, a Goodfellas goose, why not take a closer look at the satire? If this was a real salacious criminal spectacle, why throw in the climax like the half-eaten lasagna of yesterday? If it was about a withdrawal of privilege, why does the cinema fetishize it so much? And the most important question: why Jared Leto?

Rating = D +

Other critical voices to consider

Rohan Naahar at Indian express says, “Leto’s performance robs Paolo of sympathy and snatches the only blow House of Gucci had to connect with the audience.” In a sea of ​​monsters, Paolo was a breathless simpleton. And it is perhaps a fitting conclusion to his tragic story that he was immortalized by a famous actor to suck joy from the screen every time he appears there.

Kelechi Ehenulo of Set the Tape says, “Watching House of Gucci is like stepping into a feverish dream. You laugh at the absurdity as Scott composes the gloss of the Italian soap opera, the atrocious accents and the cartoonish eccentricities at eleven.

Mashable’s Kristy Puchko says “Gucci House is a swooning, surly and knowingly extravagant film that invites audiences into the glorious rush to excess and its evils. As filled with stars as it is with soap opera and pointy style moments, it’s gorgeous, glamorous, and totally Gaga.