Critics have been disappointed by The Sopranos prequel Many Saints of Newark which they say fails to chronicle Tony's rise to power and spends half the movie focusing on the iconic TV mobster's childhood.
The movie was marketed as starring the late James Gandolfini's son, Michael, as a young Tony Soprano to tell the origin story of the violent mobster in his youth.
But many reviewers pointed out he actually plays 'a rather minor role' as young actor William Ludwig plays him as a child.
Others claimed that the prequel to the hit HBO series that ran from 1999 to 2007, would have worked better as a TV show as it wasn't able to show decades of backstory within an hour and 40 minutes.
The AV Club's A.A. Dowd diagnosed the movie with 'a bad case of prequelitis' while The Daily Beast's Nick Schager damningly called it 'dry macaroni with no gravy.'
The film is ostensibly an origin story for Tony, although many reviewers note that Gandolfini is not given much screen time
Entertainment Weekly's Leah Greenblatt was a little more encouraging.
'In more than a few moments — a walk on a winter beach, a warning bullet shot through the top of a startled bouffant — that feels like actual magic, recreated,' she writes.
'At other times it just feels like a tease: ten tons of backstory squeezed into a two-hour runtime.'
While it can't fully compete, Greenblatt says it's close enough.
'Saints can't be what Sopranos was — without the time or the ones who've been lost to tell it, fuggedaboutit,' she concludes. 'But for a hundred-something minutes, it feels close enough to coming home again.'
Dowd, however, was left frustrated.
'Those Jonesing for a Corleonesque rise to power will be disappointed to learn that Tony plays a rather minor role in The Many Saints of Newark,' he writes, noting that for roughly half the film, he is played by the younger William Ludwig as a child.
Sopranos prequel film The Many Saints of Newark stars the late James Gandolfini's son, Michael as a young Tony Soprano, (left) and
