
'The Many Saints of Newark' is more than a 'Sopranos' origin story
CNN
Fourteen years after "The Sopranos" ended in much-debated fashion, "The Many Saints of Newark" reopens that universe, wisely going back decades before those events. Yet what sounds like a Tony Soprano origin story really focuses on other characters, in a richly detailed movie filled with enough new material and callbacks to accommodate a limited series, which might have been the more interesting approach.
As is, series creator David Chase -- reunited with director Alan Taylor, and sharing script credit with Lawrence Konner -- has set up a world where the young Tony, played for a little over half the film by the late James Gandolfini's son, Michael, is mostly a bystander. The main action, in fact, surrounds his uncle Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), whose son Christopher would eventually become one of the more unfortunate soldiers in the grownup Tony's ranks.
The charismatic Dickie is everyone's favorite uncle, but he's also a very, very bad guy, running a lucrative numbers operation. His life is complicated when his father (Ray Liotta) returns from Italy with a trophy wife (Michela De Rossi), who obviously didn't fall for him strictly for his charm.