TV REVIEWS : ‘Getting Gotti’ Has Fresh Focus

Mob watchers may want to check out “Getting Gotti,” not so much for what it says about John Gotti the Teflon Don but for its portrayal of a vulnerable and corruptible justice system.

Scenarist James S. Henerson’s largely absorbing and little-known mob story wisely makes Gotti (Anthony Denison) a secondary player. Instead, it focuses more freshly on an assistant D.A. (Lorraine Bracco, playing real-life prosecutor Diane Giacalone) who fights withering hostility (including the FBI) in a seven-year battle to nail the crime boss and six associates.

Stylistically, director Roger Young doesn’t break new Godfather ground, but the casting of the puffy, pasty-faced thugs and snitches is unusually authentic. And the opening sequence, in which the screen alternates between parallel “family” rituals, hurls the viewer into the nightmare story of the prosecutor and her arrogant, slippery prey.

Most important, the movie demythologizes the mob world. At one point Bracco sneers to frustrated colleagues: “Let’s cut through all the romantic, mysterious crap--’The Godfather’ . . . Al Pacino looking soulful. These gangsters are cases of arrested development.”

An Italian American who grew up at the same time and hails from the same Queens neighborhood as Gotti, the heroine is outraged that names like Gotti, Gambino and Capone are more celebrated “than Puccini, Verdi and Michelangelo.”

* “Getting Gotti” airs at 9 tonight on CBS (Channels 2 and 8) .