With its lack of focus and scattershot structure, The Many Saints of Newark fails to live up to the pedigree of The Sopranos series.

Although written and produced by The Sopranos creator David Chase and featuring the alluring tagline of “Who Made Tony Soprano?”, The Many Saints of Newark proves to be a frustrating experience of characters never given their due and scenarios that go nowhere. Younger versions of beloved characters are played as caricatures, while new characters are easily forgettable in their blandness.

The film begins, befuddlingly, with slain The Sopranos regular Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli) providing narration beyond the grave. He introduces two key figures: his father Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), and his uncle and eventual murderer Anthony Soprano (Michael Gandolfini, son of James Gandolfini who played Tony Soprano to great acclaim.)

The stage is set for a mentor-style mob movie in the vein of A Bronx Tale or Donnie Brasco, yet such a thing is too easy for Chase. No, irritation and complication are the key to Chase’s artistry, the very same artistry which saw The Sopranos cut to black in a conclusion that still has fans scratching their heads.

Rather than develop the relationship between Moltisanti and Soprano, Chase instead places “Uncle Dickie” into multiple plot-threads: an affair with his young Italian immigrant step-mother Giuseppina (Michela De Rossi); frequent visits to his jailbird uncle Salvatore (Ray Liotta) where he seeks advice on how to do “a good dead”; and a turf war with Harold McBrayer (Leslie Odom Jr), a black gangster empowered by the civil rights movement to make a name for himself.

The latter, which also heavily features the impact of the 1967 Newark Riots, feels particularly out of place, and does little to further flesh out the Sopranos world, of which The Many Saints of Newark feels more link a splintered offshoot than the foundational piece promised.

Director Alan Taylor (who helmed several episodes of The Sopranos) is unable to make these fragments into a compelling whole. It is as if a limited series is in an editing bay somewhere and this is a compilation of the “best bits” strung together with the subtlety of a Bada-Bing! stripper in a church.

Performances are mostly fine, with Vera Farmiga as the antagonistic Livia Soprano, and young Michael Gandolfini doing his late father proud, the highlights. The production design is also a standout, taking the audience back to late 1960s New Jersey and all its complicated glory.

What The Many Saints of Newark does not do is bring anything of worth to the substance of the Sopranos legacy. If anything, it brings it down a notch, and that is a damn shame.