Summary
Until we get the inevitable spin-off prequel series, here’s a whole season’s worth of plotting abbreviated into a compact package.
Cast your minds back to the late 1990s when HBO was the only name worth uttering in the premium television game. Along with stablemates Oz and Sex and the City, David Chase’s The Sopranos led the pack in ensuring we’d be paying for good TV forever. Now, fourteen years after its controversial finale, director Alan Taylor and Chase have teamed up for a prequel that surely someone’s been calling for.
Narrated by Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli), we go back to the salad days of 1967 when his father Dickie (Alessandro Nivola) was a mentor to young Tony Soprano (William Ludwig, and later Michael Gandolfini). Dickie’s father “Hollywood Dick” Moltisanti (Ray Liotta) has taken a new Italian bride (Michela De Rossi). In the background, tension mounts with the growing Newark race riots.
Which should all make for a fascinating playground for a period gangster film. Yet the ambitious plotting attempts to cram a whole season’s worth of foreshadowing and winking callbacks into a two-hour movie. (If you aren’t intimately familiar with the series, many of the references will fly over your head). Borderline incoherent at times, it swings from one scene to the next as if the tracks to the script were still being laid as the train pulled into the station.
Even the formidable cast — which also includes Vera Farmiga, Leslie Odom Jr., Jon Bernthal, a second version of Liotta and Corey Stoll (as a young Uncle Junior) — is left to simply go through the motions. In the absence of a singular driving line, the often exaggerated characters arrive in a series of abstract scenes.
At its best, the award-winning cast emotes through the thin material. At worst, such as John Magaro’s portrayal of a young Silvio Dante (played by Steve Van Zandt in the series), they are simply caricatures of more recognisable performances. The stunt casting of the late James Gandolfini’s son might give us a familiar connection, but it’s also emblematic of this problem.
The cynical viewer, or perhaps just the realist ones, will see THE MANY SAINTS OF NEWARK as a prelude to a new HBO Max series. Indeed, Warner has already indicated that’s exactly what they want. Yet countless prequels before this have shown that simply filling in some gaps are not enough to warrant a new story. So, if an ongoing series follows this outing, it has to exist as something more than just nostalgia.
2021 | USA | DIRECTOR: Alan Taylor | WRITER: David Chase, Lawrence Konner | CAST: Alessandro Nivola, Leslie Odom Jr., Jon Bernthal, Corey Stoll, Michael Gandolfini, Billy Magnussen, Michela De Rossi, John Magaro, Ray Liotta, Vera Farmiga | DISTRIBUTOR: Warner Bros. Pictures | RUNNING TIME: 120 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 1 October 2021 (US), 4 November 2021 (US)
