House of Gucci

Directed by Ridley Scott, House of Gucci details the duplicitous happenings within the title clan after a scheming opportunist (Lady Gaga’s Patrizia Reggiani) worms her way into the family’s lucrative business. Filmmaker Scott, armed with Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna’s screenplay, delivers a sporadically intriguing yet mostly underwhelming (and uninvolving) drama that feels like it should either be an hour shorter or an hour longer, as the movie, which runs a hopelessly sluggish 158 minutes, has been suffused with meandering, unnecessary subplots (eg Patrizia’s encounters with a shady psychic) that exacerbate the decidedly erratic atmosphere – while, at the same time, certain narrative threads are given short-shrift to the point where they become essentially incoherent (eg Adam Driver’s Maurizio Gucci’s transformation from easygoing law student into calculating businessman is abrupt, to say the least). And although the picture admittedly does boast a small handful of compelling stretches and a series of standout performances, with, in terms of the latter, Jared Leto’s scene-stealing efforts as the oddball Paolo Gucci an obvious highlight (Gaga’s one-note turn as Patrizia, on the other hand, grows more and more tedious as time progresses), House of Gucci eventually proceeds into a padded-out, aggressively prolonged third act that ensures it palpably peters out long before arriving at its inevitable finale – which ultimately cements the film’s place as yet another unfocused misfire from an increasingly lackluster director.

** out of ****