Blu-Ray Review – The Making of the Mob

Blu-ray Reviews, Reviews, Top Story

American film and television has had a weird obsession with the Mafia for as long as the group has been exposied it seems. For all the years, manpower and money law enforcement has spent on breaking the mob’s grip on organized crime in this country we’ve romanticized them in movies and television for as long as the medium has been available. We want our criminals to be more like Brando in The Godfather as opposed to Pesci in Goodfellas … we want this sort of criminal code of honor surrounding those who making their living outside the law instead of the street thugs that they generally tend to be.

Thus it’s interesting to see AMC tackle the subject of the mob’s creation. So many pieces have taken on many of the aspects of the mob’s early life, including some of its more famous members, but a history of the mob from its origins over 100 years ago is fairly ambitious.

Broken up into eight parts, the show focuses on the New York mob that started (and at one point controlled most of major crime in America) the institution in America. Blending in a documentary narrative with recreated footage, as well as interviews from all sorts of people involved with the mob over the years, this is about as good an accurate an introduction to the New York mob as it gets.

The problem comes from the fact that it can only cover so much. This is a greatest hits of covering the mob, nothing more, as this covers all of the basics of the mob’s origins but doesn’t get into anything more than the major players and everyone who’s ever had a film made about them. If you’ve watched enough mob movies over the years this is mainly a series that’ll fill in some of the missing pieces films like Bugsy didn’t provide.

There’s a handful of extras, mainly enough to make it feel like they were aborted episodes and left as small mini-episode type pieces.

Anchor Bay presents The Making of the Mob. Run Time: 343 minutes Not Rated. Released on DVD: