By Tony Frame. Contains mild spoilers of The Sopranos.

---

The Sopranos prequel is a beautifully shot gangster drama that fails to live up to the expectations of its TV predecessor. In fairness, the boots were always going to be too big to fill, even with Michael Gandolfini taking on the younger role of his late father. The story is predominantly focused on Dickie Moltisanti (father to Christopher Moltisanti, whom Tony murdered in The Sopranos) and his influence on the young Tony amidst the racial tensions started by the Watts riots. All the familiar characters pop up as their younger selves here (Paulie, Silvio, Uncle Junior et al), and although the actors give fine performances you can’t but help feel some of them are trying too hard to imitate their older versions from the TV show. It’s almost like they’re doing a caricature of their character’s most common traits to the point that it’s almost laughable, like a skit you would see on SNL.

I was excited when this movie was originally announced, and even more pumped when I heard that Michael Gandolfini was being cast as the younger Tony Soprano. I expected the film to be about a young Tony, but what I got was a film about someone else (who wasn’t that interesting to be honest), with a young Tony only appearing in a few scenes.  Don’t get me wrong, Gandolfini jnr. nails the slight mannerisms of his late father to a tee without overacting, but I felt he was let down with not being given more to do. Good gangster films are hard to come by nowadays, being that the genre has (possibly) been done to death in film and TV. But that’s no excuse here when you consider the talent and the budget involved, so I’ll not beat around the bush; the story was messy in places and the killings didn’t have the weight behind them that The Sopranos was known for. Ray Liotta and Jon Bernthal were completely wasted in a plot that had too many characters which took the focus off the important ones. What this really needed the most for it to work was for it to be a limited eight-part series, not a two-hour movie. Because it’s quite a forgettable one in many ways and doesn’t feel like it belongs in The Sopranos universe at all.