I guess the key word here is "Docudrama" and for a Docudrama, it honestly moves a bit too fast. Actually, for the amount of information it conveys, it moves a lot too fast and feels a bit crammed.
It would have been nice, and probably a lot more expensive, if they dragged it out a little longer so that they could pay attention to some of the finer details. Instead, a lot of the little things co... Read more
I guess the key word here is "Docudrama" and for a Docudrama, it honestly moves a bit too fast. Actually, for the amount of information it conveys, it moves a lot too fast and feels a bit crammed.
It would have been nice, and probably a lot more expensive, if they dragged it out a little longer so that they could pay attention to some of the finer details. Instead, a lot of the little things come at you with all the force and speed of a shotgun blast.
It doesn't really give you time to linger on it and contemplate it. Usually the nice thing about docudramas is that there is enough filler and useless details to let you dwell on the important ones for at least a couple of seconds.
However, despite that, the information is there. Ray Liotta is a great narrator, the cast of interviews are the regular faces that you've grown accustomed to seeing in documentaries about the mob, particularly Rabb (who is in every mob documentary ever made), with a couple of distant relatives and decedents of the people portrayed along with additional actors known for gangster rolls to fill out the interviews nicely.
It's not a matter of too much information and it's not a matter of too little. What gets me about this is the pacing and the order of the information it presents. When a big, profound, and stunning item is dropped on the audience, good documentaries give them time to digest it with either reenactments that the audience can not pay attention to or little unimportant facts that most viewers don't care about.
Instead it too often drops one blow after another and relies on repetition too much rather than digestion. And, as where that works well in movies to keep the viewer on the edge of their seat, it doesn't in documentaries that tend to attract an audience that wants to brings an entirely different kind of fascination to what they are watching. The wow factor shouldn't be in the action in a series like this, it should come with giving the mind a moment to take in that "whoa, they actually did that" moment.Show less
