The Many Saints of Newark - Review Thread

I'm not quite done yet... Fell asleep trying to polish it off last night. But it really would have to turn up to break a 5 for me.

I was begging for a dream sequence compared to these winks and nods.

I would be much, much more forgiving if they had nailed that part but even there I felt like they just whiffed.  I mean Dick has a couple scenes with Tony when he's a kid, a couple more when he's a teen and none of them are really that profound or added to any arc.  I guess the closest we get is when he gives him the stolen speakers (from the trailer) but other than that I didn't think there was much else to it.  As far as the movie presented it, Dickie would have been just another character among a sea of ancillary characters in his life.  The only reason he seems to be more is because of a couple lines like 'Dickie is the only one Tony listens to.' 

Just curious, did you watch it in the theater or on HBO?

Yeah, I caught it on HBO. Not that I think it matters too much, I don't think I would have loved it had I seen it on the big screen but maybe I would have bumped it up half a grade. But then I think had I thought about it more it would have deflated. Gah, I'll stop thinking about this movie now.

Well the second half was... Marginally better than the first half. Young Tony didn't bother me much at all, but the entire story did.

4/10 - uninspired

The Many Saints of Newark ain't Better Call Saul, that's for sure.

The Many Saints of Newark(10/16/2021)
“The Sopranos” was the work of a fairly demanding creator named David Chase, who strikes me as a rather demanding fellow who does not suffer fools and who was pretty defensive about the legacy of his signature creation, which is to say I did have some confidence that if he was going to make a prequel film to that series it would have been for the right reasons and not just as a cash-grab. And indeed, I do think that The Many Saints of Newark was made with legitimate conviction but that does not necessarily mean it was a great idea. The film looks at the goings on with the DiMeo crime family in the late 60s and early 70s right as Tony Soprano was growing up and was not yet directly involved in the “family business.” I must say that I was at a bit of a disadvantaged with this movie as, while I have watched “The Sopranos” I’ve only done so once and was only just barely caught up in time to watch that famous cut to black live when it first aired. So it’s been almost fifteen years since I was immersed in this family and its business and a lot of my memories of it and the names of all its characters are a bit hazy, so it wasn’t entirely clear to me exactly who some of these characters from the previous generation were and what relation they had to the people from the show. But obviously I remembered Tony and there was something a bit interesting if perhaps anti-climactic about seeing him as an aimless teenager who probably resembles in behavior his future son A.J. more than you might expect, but on its surface he’s more of a background element in this story than he is the main player.

As for the foreground elements, they’re alright. One could imagine a world where, for whatever reason, the Sopranos IP was no longer usable they maybe could have re-written this into a stand-alone mob movie and honestly I wonder if that version of the film might have worked better. In its current form the film seems to have most of the beats of a regular mob story except that it’s going on these seeming tangents about side characters (like a teenager named Tony) and the story seemingly ends without a full resolution to the central conflict (yes, an abrupt ending to something related to the Sopranos, imagine such a thing). The film also has a slightly episodic structure and is covering a pretty long span of time and you kind of wonder if all involved might have been better off sticking to the format they started in and turned this into a series or miniseries rather than a feature film. Still I’m not sure a TV series version of this would have been terribly well received either, in large part because The Sopranos is a very tough act to follow and in many ways any attempt to “expand the franchise” is kind of going to cheapen it. In many ways the movie reminds me of is actually The Godfather Part III, which is a comparison that probably sounds more harsh than I intend it to because The Godfather Part III is a movie that absolutely does have some good ideas and good moments to it, it just can’t overcome the baggage of what came before it and it kind of feels like an appendage that came long after the fact rather than a worthy follow-up. Similarly there are in fact some very good elements to this movie: the acting is strong across the board, it looks good, it has some good scenes and moments but it’s also structurally odd, basically unwatchable without knowledge of the show, and just when things are starting to click it cuts itself off. Probably should have just left well enough alone.
*** out of Five

No, it's a weak movie and extremely disjointed like you said. As we've peppered throughout the thread and others have said online, it probably would have been much better served as a limited series instead of cramming all that into a 2 hour movie.  

We should start a petition to just have this remade into a limited series. We'll all pretend that this movie didn't happen while we eagerly await the 8-10 episode prequel series featuring the same cast. Well, not Ray Liotta but that identical twin thing was pretty ridiculous anyways.