Los Santos De La Mafia

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 :)

They made a movie about Dickie Moltisanti. Most Soprano fans couldn't give a damn about Dickie. He's a background character.

Fans wanted a show about Tony Soprano. The movie made Tony a background character. We learned more about Tony's childhood from the original show than we do during this movie.

With the exception of one scene, we don't even know anything about Tony's relationship with his father.

It's puzzling. The original show was all about the complexity of family dynamics. This movie was a B-rate gangster flick sidetracked by a plot about a black gangster during a time in the 60's when there would have been minimal interaction between street gangs & mob bosses.

The fans wanted a Tony Soprano coming of age Story. Instead the producers delivered a 2 hour film with 14 minutes of Tony Soprano flashbacks.

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.

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."

Jon Bernthal said this film isn't like the Sopranos, and I can see what he means. I walked in thinking this would focus on Tony Sopranos' route to becoming who he is when we meet him in the first episode of the Sopranos, but instead, it focuses on Christopher's dad, Dickie Moltisanti.

The acting is superb, but the plot is thin. Dickie is not a particularly interesting character. In fact, I think focusing on Johnny Soprano would've made for a way more gripping film. What we end up with is something half-baked, more of a mini series than a stand-alone film. I have to admit, when the credits started coming up, I was thinking, "Is this it?"

For a Sopranos fan, it's worth a watch, but ultimately, it was underwhelming.