Bennifer, The Movie: Gigli, the toxic turkey that ruined Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez

In the latest bid by our nostalgic society to plunge backwards in time, it's rumoured that the Noughties phenomenon “Bennifer” (aka celebrity couple Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez) is back on. The best way to celebrate this heartening news? Revisit the epically disastrous romcom where the pair first met.

Let’s start with how to pronounce it. Gigli. Surely not “Giggly”? No. “Jeely”. Really? Toy with it on the tongue. Pucker up to it. See if you can dimly remember what made it the most notorious bomb of its day.

It’s a solid rule of thumb, when releasing a $75 million crime romcom aimed at a broad international audience, to pick a title for the damn thing which won’t prove entirely unpronounceable for a wide majority of prospective viewers. Imagine, say, Welsh punters at the ticket counter. “Two for… Gigg… Jiggly? Geely? Whatever that is.”

If they’d even made it that far. Columbia Pictures, who released the movie with a sinking feeling in August 2003, had reasons to be jittery, much like Titanic’s designer after the iceberg had already done its damage. Bad press had plagued the film from the word go. Halle Berry, it was said, had dropped out of the role eventually played by Jennifer Lopez.

Revolution Studios’ Joe Roth, who had thrown in much of the money, was demanding recuts and increasingly contentious final-act changes. And all tabloid eyes were peeled on J.Lo and Ben Affleck, in the title role of a lowlife mob enforcer called Larry Gigli, after they’d become engaged in November 2002.

Right as production began, these two became the first celebrity couple to find themselves with a conjoined nickname – Bennifer – thereby pre-dating red-top obsessions with the likes of TomKat and Brangelina. Without entirely wanting to be, this thing was shaping up as Bennifer: The Movie, and already had the look of something hubristic and smug – the look of a supercouple love-in, essentially, which no one outside the industry bubble was particularly rooting for.

The ghastly poster, with rapt Bennifer gazing into each other’s eyes and looking conspicuously Photoshopped, right down to Lopez’s buns in eye-wateringly tight denim, didn’t help.

But the real architect of this catastrophe was the man who wrote, directed and produced it, and has yet to be let out of the Hollywood sin bin even now: Martin Brest.

The story so far. Twenty years earlier, Brest had made his name with a pair of star-led Eighties action comedies, Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and Midnight Run (1988). He’d increased his cachet, somehow, by directing Al Pacino to the Best Actor Oscar for one of his worst performances, as hoo-hahhing blind army vet Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman (1992). While the film was a surprising commercial hit, critics griped about its excessive length, windy script, and indulgence of that mega-hammy star turn.

It was long, slow, and looked calculated to win awards. But it had nothing on Brest’s next one, Meet Joe Black (1998). A three-hour long romantic drama starring Brad Pitt as Death? What was anyone thinking? Dressed to the nines and shot with wasteful splendour by Emmanuel Lubezki, this was lavish, $90 million prestige-bait which didn’t reap a single Oscar nomination, and recouped only half its budget in the USA.

By any sane studio accounting of risk and reward, Brest should have been in trouble. This was the moment to retrench into something cheap and cheerful, or at the very least commercially fail-safe. Instead, on Gigli, he was given enough rope to hang himself several times over. You could start, because someone should have, with his script – a genuine trainwreck of a thing, guilty of constantly trying too hard when it’s not causing active, jaw-dropping offence.

Affleck’s Larry and Lopez’s Ricki have to play minder to a teenager with learning difficulties, played by Justin Bartha, who at one point talks about his penis sneezing during a viewing of Baywatch, and is described in the press notes as “Brian, the guileless innocent, who changes the destinies of Ricki and Gigli.”

A pick 'n' mix buffet of developmental problems, he demonstrates symptoms of autism, brain damage, and Tourette’s, seemingly depending on what Brest finds funniest or most novel for any particular scene.

Having worked at Bronx State Hospital while going through college, Brest claimed to have been “intrigued by the variety of behaviours, disorders and pathologies he encountered.” It’s a boon to us all that this wealth of diverse human experience got funnelled into one absolutely terrible character.

Bartha’s research doesn’t sound much more specific, either. “Most of the disabled men and women I encountered are honest, optimistic, and live in the moment,” he said at the time. The net result of their findings is one of the most patronising and twee depictions of intellectual disability ever put on screen.

Then there’s the question of Ricki’s sexuality. She’s a lesbian, a fact completely elided in the trailer and marketing. (Mustn’t frighten the horses.) In one especially toxic monologue, the endlessly vile Larry complains that she’s “a stone cold dyke. A f______ untouchable, unhaveable, unattainable brick wall f______ dyke-a-saurus rexi. So it’s sad.”

Followers of Affleck’s career as a leading man might wonder for how long this dyke-a-saurus actually remains one, especially if they’ve seen Chasing Amy (1997), in which his character single-handedly converts the lesbian played by Joey Lauren Adams into someone who prefers sex with men.

And yep, before we know it, J.Lo’s Ricki is an untouchable, unhaveable, unattainable brick wall whom Larry has managed to touch, have, and indeed attain. Is there no lesbian on movie Earth who wouldn’t recant after a vigorous Afflecking?

Before this can all be fully consummated, though, there’s the infamous “turkey time” scene – an invitation for Larry to go down on Ricki, which ends with J.Lo, in surely the lowest moment of her then-viable film career, beckoning him in with the fateful words “gobble gobble”. The closest Larry comes to having a character arc in the movie, in fact, is learning to perform oral sex as a pre-condition of pulling lesbians.

Reading Gigli’s production notes now, you get no indication that anyone involved thought things might be going a little off-piste. A lost classic of the PR-puffery genre, they conjure up a halcyon and surely fictitious era, after the wrap, when Gigli was about to be enshrined as a future classic.

“Marty [Brest] would jump up and down and dance around and scream when a take was particularly good,” said Lopez to the press kit. “He does more takes than anyone I’ve ever worked with,” added Affleck, which begs an entirely different set of questions, mainly what the bejeezus ended up on the cutting-room floor.

Ranty, overblown cameos from Christopher Walken and Al Pacino, as a Walken-ish cop and a Pacino-esque mob boss respectively, don’t come close to rescuing the film from all its lurid, shaggy-dog absurdity. But those two just swanned in for a couple of days – their necks weren’t on the line. The most surprising legacy of all this, given the gruesome awfulness of his faux-Italian posturing in it, is how remarkably Affleck succeeded in bouncing back.

He’s subsequently called 2003 an annus horribilis, and definitely languished in career hell for a year or two – remember Surviving Christmas? Smokin’ Aces? Or, indeed, Kevin Smith’s Jersey Girl (2004), co-starring J.Lo yet again? Only after the Gigli fiasco did Miramax decide to eliminate her almost completely from that film’s marketing, and flag up the fact that her character dies of an aneurysm during childbirth. Such was the forever tarnished lure of the Bennifer brand. A mere month after Gigli opened and became an instant laughing stock, the couple postponed their nuptials; by January 2004 they had split up. Bennifer: The Movie came out, was mocked, and died, just like Bennifer: The True Story.

Ducking behind the camera, as a route to career rehab for Affleck, worked better than anyone might have guessed – at least, until it didn't. Gone Baby Gone (2007), then The Town (2010), and then the Oscar-winning Argo (2012) have each represented a solid step back up to industry respect, enough even to recuperate his leading man status in time for David Fincher’s Gone Girl (2014).

Lately, things have gotten a little wobblier. His fourth directorial effort was the period gangster megabomb Live by Night (2016), and his association with Batman in the trio of DC blockbusters around that time (BvS: Dawn of Justice, Suicide Squad and Justice League) has not exactly reinstalled him as a critics' favourite. Even so, the payday must have been a relief. Each one of those – get this – took about a hundred times more at the box office than Gigli managed in its entire run, which was a truly galling $7.3 million worldwide. Affleck’s salary alone was a reported $12.5 million; Lopez’s $12 million.

On release, critics practically rubbed their hands with glee – it was easily the most vitriolically reviewed American film of its year, arguably the whole decade. The fallout for J.Lo was much less forgiving, and unfairly so. The truth, if we dare whisper it, is that she’s really not bad in Gigli at all – radiating that husky charisma just fine whenever the script stops forcing her to be embarrassing.

Derided though it was, her bitch-off with Jane Fonda in Monster-in-Law (2005) was a bona fide hit; but then stabs at credibility with stuff like An Unfinished Life (2005) and the direct-to-video Bordertown (2006) went barely seen by anyone. She even made a heinous romcom called The Back-Up Plan (2010), whose very title seemed to predict the future ahead.

Little by little, Lopez – who was so, so promising back in her Out of Sight (1998) days – moved away from limelight movie stardom and pushed her music career harder, helped by a 2012 stint as an American Idol judge. A couple of other movies – Parker (2013), The Boy Next Door (2015) – modestly trickled out.

Only one film lately has sown the seeds of a resurgence: Lorene Scafaria's Hustlers (2018), where her luminously charismatic, queen-bee performance was unlucky not to snag an Oscar nomination. When Matthew McConaughey gave us a similar turn in Magic Mike, career rehabilitation (and soon, an Oscar) were around the corner. In Lopez's case, it might be too soon to hope for such a serious and immediate comeback. The two films she's got in the can since Hustlers are very much in her romcom comfort zone: Marry Me and Shotgun Wedding, both due out next year.

As for the since-reclusive Brest, he has become a cautionary tale for any director in Hollywood given a large degree of clout to get his films green-lit before anyone, seemingly, has bothered to read them. He’s 69 now, hasn’t given any interviews since the whole debacle, and it’s unclear if he’ll ever make a film again. There’s a tell-all to be written, but he probably isn’t the man to write it, unless he’s willing to perform a thorough post-mortem on his own career.

No one should have let Gigli happen, and the guy whose baby it was, from first to humiliating last, must ultimately have grasped that. Heaven's Gate used to be the touchstone, tinged with a certain schadenfreude, whenever rival studios or reporters smelled a flop coming. Now, and for the foreseeable future, it's Gigli. Gobble gobble, and beware. It's turkey time.