Gaga’s Gucci biopic provides ‘knuckle-chewing awfulness’

RIDLEY SCOTT has always seen the film frame in painterly terms, as a dance of light, colours and shade.

Hand him a tight script and some top-tier performers and he produces dramatic gold (from Alien to Gladiator to The Martian).

With a flabby screenplay, alas, and a bunch of half-cocked thesps, the results can be atrocious.

This howlingly inept biopic, probably his worst film since

The Counselor, has several moments of such knucklechewing awfulness that it seems to lurch into wonky self-parody.

Most of these moments involve lead player Lady Gaga, who has been inexplicably cast as Italian ‘‘black widow’’ Patrizia

Reggiani, who infamously hired a hitman to kill her ex-husband Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver) in 1995 and who is here imagined as a mildly hysterical hybrid of Gina Lollobrigida, Sue Ellen from Dallas and a Dolmio pasta muppet.

Lumbered with a gaspinducing ‘‘Italian’’ accent (‘‘Eeees ah time to ah take out ah dee trash, ah!’’) and a one-note character sketch, her limitations as a performer are cruelly exposed.

She is also surrounded by a bestiary of screen-chewers, none more voracious than Jared Leto, lathered in Latex makeup as family wildcard Paolo Gucci and delivering every line with the kind of laboured intensity that destroys the meaning of the scenes and acts as a slow-motion coup de grace for a film already on its knees.

The cod-Italian nonsense might not have mattered if the film had some sense of dramatic purpose.

Come on, though – the magazines are in Italian, as are the TV shows and radio broadcasts, but when ‘‘proper’’ conversations are required the entire cast, including Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons, immediately switch into Cornetto mode.

From an anaemic script cowritten by Becky Johnston, the film opens and closes with the assassination set piece, and everything in between is the clumsily executed tale of how Gucci went from an expensive but boring brand to an expensive but stylish one.

As Paolo would say, and indeed did wail, midway through the movie, ‘‘Why-ah? Why-ah? Why-ah?’’