“Now we can see why the Jennifer Lopez-Ben Affleck marriage was called off. It was on grounds of unreasonable cruelty to audiences,” reported the Daily Mail. “After the schadenfreudian thrill of watching beautiful people humiliate themselves wears off, it has the same annihilating effect on your will to live,” noted Newsweek. “More stupefying follies may come, but it’s impossible to imagine how they’ll beat this one for staggering idiocy, fatuousness, or pretension,” claimed the Wall Street Journal. And these were some of the more positive reviews of “Gigli,” the 2003 action romance which very nearly sank the careers of its two leads.
Much of the ire was directed toward one particular moment, the scene where Lopez’s lesbian gangster commands Affleck’s mobster to show off his oral skills with the phrase, “It’s turkey time! Gobble, gobble, gobble.” These six words instantly guaranteed the film a place in Hollywood’s Hall of Shame, and for many, remains the most embarrassing exchange in the power couple’s history.
Affleck and Lopez split five months after the box office turkey’s release. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly in 2022, the former recalled how he felt at the time, “The funny name, the Jennifer Lopez romance and overexposure of that, it was kind of a perfect storm. And I remember talking to Marty [director Martin Brest] the Friday it came out and I was like it’s just spectacular, it’s a tsunami, it couldn’t be worse. This is as bad as it gets.”
