When I wrote my review for The Last Duel, I had this to say in my postscript. In the world of Highlander there can only be one; by this rule this means that only one of the prestige Ridley Scott movies we’re getting this winter can succeed. Now it’s immediately becoming very clear that in the commercial sense that The Last Duel will not succeed, so now we must just wait and see what will be the situation with House of Gucci. I mean it really does look like a real firecracker of a film. I have no idea why I chose to describe it like that. Well, now I have seen House of Gucci, and in actuality it does succeed, on many fronts. ‘The rules of Highlander’ be damned!

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So what can be said here? Gucci really is a rather perplexing film, but also rather not. In so many ways it is just frankly an oddity - it is neither the so-bad-it's good festival of ridiculousness that many of us hoped it to be, nor is it actually the film of significant quality that it's cast, director and plot possibly promised us.  I'm going to go out on a limb and state that personally for me Gucci is a good film that I enjoyed a lot. The ultimate undeniabilities of the film are that it is simply too long, albeit I don't know where I'd cut or if this length will just simply not be an issue when it comes to home viewing. However everything else sort of feels in a weird liminal space where quality is in the eye of the beholder. I have clearly unpopular opinions about certain performances which I will get to in a moment, however overall Gucci's clear and almost undeniable best feature is the ensemble of performances on display, where absolutely everybody is going for as many outlandish moments as they can. However as I have already stated, these performances neither go too over the top or are the best performances of the year, but for me they all worked - this is a film that straddles at all times a razor's edge tightrope of cringe and absurdity and makes it all the way to the end without falling off. Also it really just can't be underestimated to what extent it seems impossible for Ridley Scott to make a truly bad and without value film, no matter the scale, no matter the genre or quality even of the original material, Scott always manages to deliver films that put excellent performers on display to deliver all of their best traits and here for the most part he is dealing with performers who are at their best when truly 'going for it' and maximises this to tell a tale that needs to be told in that fashion to land. I mean is there truthfully an alternate world where a quote-un-quote better cast and crew make a more down to earth and pared down approach to this story leads to a more successful version? I think not. The world of Gucci and high-fashion, as well as the absurd criminal underworld requires this level of performance and it is truly what makes the film sing. 

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The film really is above anything else a performance piece and for me there really isn't a bad apple. I should elaborate that I am entirely and totally doubling down on the stance that Jared Leto is not only good in this film, but is exactly the boost of bizarreness and pitiful dark comedy that this film needs. As this deeply absurd caricature he delivers a version of Cazale's Fredo heightened to all new levels of uselessness and arrogance. I am clearly an outsider in this stance, as many critics have already stated and my closest friend commented "that I am insane". However it is very clear whilst watching the film that he is the outsider, sure, everybody is also heightened to a degree, however Leto is clearly going for it to an even further level, an almost movie-quality threatening level, but as I have already stated, maybe I'm a mad man. But for me; it worked. Adam Driver is the polar opposite of Leto here, giving us the grounded centre that the film also deeply needs. If Driver was too 'going for broke' the film would suddenly lose all grasp on reality and would send us into farcical territory, which this film already gets close to doing and in so many ways could very well have been more entertaining than the film we actually got, however I find there is a lot more strength in having a central figure like Driver. Driver is sublime and for the first stretch of the film is a delightfully nebbish rom-com leading man, with an almost Woody Allen-esque shy quality. Then we meet Gaga, the real central powerhouse performance of the film, who manages to give us the perfect middle ground between the bombastic indeedly borderline caricaturish elements of Leto and the groundedness of Driver that she so perfectly already showed us in A Star is Born. She is the middle ground and is the perfect exemplification of the film at its best. Pacino of course always has my heart and here once more breaks it, this softer old man lane that he has gotten into in recent roles really is a place where he can find tremendous success in a new era for himself as a performer.

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Gucci is a delightful 8/10 that relishes in its over-the-topness, whilst also surprisingly having a grounded quality to it as an overall tone. A film that will actually spend significantly less time on the more interesting scandals of the true story, and will instead use this stranger than fiction tale as a form of epilogue to the rest of the saga we have already seen. But you don’t want story, not here, not with this film. We want sensationalist performances and firecracker lines of dialogue bordering on the absurd. Well Gucci gives us all that, but not nessecerilly much more.

P.S. Adam Driver has delivered three of the best performances of the year, all vastly different from one another and only further exemplifying his boundless talents. Driver you are the king. That’s all. It's a shame that none of these three will get Oscar Buzz, but hopefully I am wrong. 

-       -   Thomas Carruthers