The Many Saints of Newark

It is the late 1960s and Dick Moltisanti is a leading figure in the Newark Mafia. His son, Dickie, takes after him and is rising up through the ranks. Dickie is a father figure to a boy who will ultimately run his own crime family, Tony Soprano.

Set about 30 years before the events of the TV series The Sopranos, this is a prequel to that. I regard The Sopranos as the greatest drama series of all time so my interest was piqued, especially as the tagline labelled it "Who made Tony Soprano". I didn't feel that The Sopranos needed a prequel, but was intrigued nevertheless.

It looks good on paper: written by David Chase, creator and head writer of The Sopranos, directed by Alan Taylor, who directed several episodes of The Sopranos. So you know this has right pedigree and isn't some independent production trying to make use of The Sopranos brand. Throw in a decent cast: Ray Liotta, Alessandro Nivola, Leslie Odom Jr, Vera Farmiga, John Bernthal and even Michael Gandolfini, the son of James Gandolfini who played Tony Soprano in the series, as the teenaged Tony Soprano.

The film started well enough: the set up was interesting and the characters reasonably engaging. Plot development is initially intriguing but then the cracks begin to show. From a point I kept thinking "there's only one way this is going to end". This was mainly based on the characters appearing in The Sopranos but I think even without that knowledge the signs were there how this was going to turn out.

Another, though more minor, issue is that David Chase seemed overly keen to jam as many characters from the TV series into the movie, just to create that spark of recognition among fans of the TV series.

The ending is predictable (as mentioned above) and very flat. Even if you didn't figure out in advance how things would work out, the conclusion is very anti-climactic and empty. Moreover, the explanation of and link to Tony Soprano's later life and activities is not there, making it quite disappointing.

Considering this, someone who's never watched The Sopranos might find this film more interesting as they won't have an expectation of some profound explanation of Tony Soprano's later career or events in the series and won't be distracted by the insertion of characters from the series just for recognition value. However, even for the uninitiated, at best this is just okay due to the flat ending.

Really? All that talent and money, and yet overall this is a meandering narrative mess that doesn't know what story it wants to tell. It is more or less a hodgepodge of cameos by younger versions of the TV series characters superimposed over a laughably shallow and revisionist narrative on the riots that destroyed Newark NJ.

The closest analogy I can give is the shockingly bad "Deadwood: The Movie" which was an insult to everyone who enjoyed the Deadwood series. It makes me profoundly grateful that no "movie" was made following "Rome" or Boardwalk Empire."

There's no mafia story in this movie and the plot is very weak, focusing on irrelevant characters for too long but failling to create any connection to these characters.

We have a bunch of mafia guys with no actual enemies. A mistress we don't really care about, since the lead character doesn't seem to really. A "business associate" turned rival that only Dickie really interacts with and in the end doesn't seem relevant to anything.

The Sopranos connection is weak at best, except for the Junior stuff, but even that is fan service done poorly. Here's that line from the show "wink wink".

We do get to find out what happened to Dickie, but that would've meant more if it turned out Tony knew when he sent Christopher after his dad's killer in the show.

Having Tony Soprano as a teenager wandering through the movie here and there but not really being a part of him was a waste.

Prequels are hard, unless you go back far enough where none of the characters are really relevant, you end up winking at the audience and mentioning things that happened instead of focusing on the story.

This movie made me appreciate what Better Call Saul does even more.

Showing us events that we "heard" about, introducing characters we already knew and maybe know where they end up, showing what made a character act a certain way, how they got that scar, it's all fun and good fan service, but you need a story. This movie didn't really have one.

If the Sopranos had relied on this film to launch the tv series, the show would never had been released.

Its an average film, neither offensive to the brain nor exhilarating, but it fails miserably to develop any excitement to the 'coming' of Tony.

If you want to watch a movie about growing up to become a gangster...watch Goodfellas :)

I think I'm right in saying that this is another one of the films that is going to open on "HBO Max" in the States, rather than widely at the cinema. Here in the UK, we have had a cinematic release and as a fan of "The Sopranos" I jumped at the chance go. Though I wouldn't go as far as to say I was disappointed, I came away unsure as to the point of what I'd seen.

Richard Moltisanti (Allesandro Nivola) is a gangster, running numbers and trafficking stolen goods in Newark. Initially struggling to conceive a child of his own, he acts like a second father to the son of his friend Johnny Boy Soprano (Jon Bernthal). Young Tony (William Ludwig/Michael Gandolfini) has an unstable homelife and is beginning to act out at school. Dickie Moltisanti has other issues though, such as the rise of black gangs in the neighbourhood following the riots of 1967 and his attraction to his father's young new wife, Giuseppina (Michela De Rossi).

It's not that this is bad. By no means is it bad. The performances are excellent, the impressions of established characters are nicely done, the recreation of the 1960's and 1970's is really well done. It's that I felt like I was watching what should have been at least three seasons of television, with the fast forward button on. It's interesting to see that this is being sold as "The formative years of Tony Soprano" when really that's quite a small part of the overall film, barely even a third of it, I'd say. It's very much the Dickie Moltisanti story, narrated from beyond the grave, by his son. It's his relations that make up the bulk of the story and not just his relationship with Tony, but also with his father played by Ray Liotta, his new step mother, a low level runner called Harold McBrayer, played by Leslie Odom Jr and with the rest of the family - both actual and metaphorical.

There are quite a few different plot points to the film, but all are shallowly dealt with as they only have two hours to play out, rather than thirty. It's like watching a wrap up film for a cancelled TV show where the writers say, "this is where we would have gone". None of the betrayals or murders play that heavy as we don't spend enough time with the characters to get more than a basic feel about who they are.

Again, I don't want to bang on as if what's here isn't good. It is, and I really hope if finally allows Allesandro Nivola to get some meatier roles again, and, on the smaller screen, it might seem more fitting than it does at the Cinema. But I came away wishing I could have the rest of this, rather than just the tiny taster menu that was on offer.