At .least if you are Italian, what crime does not pay in money it pays in dividends that show up on your waistline. That is part of the genre and it has come to an expected feature of Italian gangster films. More irritating, however, are the number of product placements that Newell has put into his film. It is not even particularly subtly done. In the middle of a dark warehouse neighborhood there will be a big company logo very obviously placed in the picture.
Deep focus is used in a kitchen scene so that the viewer can pick up the name on a cereal box.
Later much the same is done with a scene at an airport in which the camera focus lets us read clearly the company name on a plane. If Newell has so little respect for his own movie that he sells advertising space in it, it is a lot harder for me as a viewer to respect it. The script seems to have been written with the emphasis on Brasco balancing two very different lives, but in fact Pacino pulls our attention toward his character and make him more of interest than Depp's. After he stops fighting it, he finds parenthood fulfilling an emptiness in his life. The familiar plot is made somewhat more interesting by being set in a Czechoslovakia while Soviet rule is crumbling.