House of Gucci — A Fashion Flop

House of Gucci is like a walk across the cinematic equivalent of Canal Street, where shady merchants sell ersatz designer merchandise: Instead of a purse whose clasp falls off, the movie amounts to a dull, cheap knockoff of Martin Scorsese.

Films about flamboyantly dressed Italians setting out to kill each other are rarely dull, but 83-year-old Ridley Scott’s 27th feature drags. You may think it’s easy to journey down the decades the way Scorsese did, dazzling everyone with fantastic costumes and production design and building set pieces around pop tunes on the soundtrack while creepy people do sinister and hilarious things. Scott proves it’s hard to pull off, using familiar Scorsese techniques to tell a turgid, muddled story about murderous intrigue at the heart of a fashion label in Milan. For all of House of Gucci’s labored attempts at dark comedy, the only stuff that’s funny in it is the overacting and the mamma-mia Italian accents, which make everyone sound like Chico Marx.

About the Author

Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith is the film critic for the Wall Street Journal.

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House of Gucci is like a walk across the cinematic equivalent of Canal Street, where shady merchants sell ersatz designer merchandise: Instead of a purse whose clasp falls off, the movie amounts to a dull, cheap knockoff of Martin Scorsese.

Films about flamboyantly dressed Italians setting out to kill each other are rarely dull, but 83-year-old Ridley Scott’s 27th feature drags. You may think it’s easy to journey down the decades the way Scorsese did, dazzling everyone with fantastic costumes and production design and building set pieces around pop tunes on the soundtrack while creepy people do sinister and hilarious things. Scott proves it’s hard to pull off, using familiar Scorsese techniques to tell a turgid, muddled story about murderous intrigue at the heart of a fashion label in Milan. For all of House of Gucci’s labored attempts at dark comedy, the only stuff that’s funny in it is the overacting and the mamma-mia Italian accents, which make everyone sound like Chico Marx.