| The Road to Perdition is only Sam Mendes' second movie, yet already he is employing such A-listers as Tom Hanks, Paul Newman and Jude Law. The acclaim surrounding his debut, American Beauty made this possible. I was not a fan of American Beauty, I thought it was full of meaningless esoteric rubbish trying to convince its audience that it was really meaningful, while having very little of actual interest to say. In The Road To Perdition Mendes has retained his very slow, sweeping directing style, which attempts to embue every scene with an epic quality. The movie is very good to look at, with washed-out colours and lots of men in long trench coats and hats evoking the 1930s style perfectly. Unlike his movie-length soap opera, though, he is working with a very good story this time, based upon a graphic novel by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Raynor. Tom Hanks plays Michael Sullivan (senior), a hired goon for local mafia boss John Rooney (Paul Newman), who looked after him as an orphaned child. When Sullivan's elder son, Michael (Tyler Hoechlin), witnesses him and Rooney's son Connor (Frank Craig) kill an employee and his friends, the two Michael Sullivans have to go on the run. Tom Hanks is very good in this movie, although purportedly playing a 'bad guy' for the first time, he's not really a traditional bad guy in the sense that he's opposing a hero. He's still a nice guy deep down. But he can play the hard man suprisingly well, and looks unusually big and threatening in his trench coat. Young Tyler Hoechlin is very well cast as Sullivan junior, although the focus slowly shifts away from him. Paul Newman is superb as the father torn between loyalty to his sociopathic son Connor and his loyal adopted son Michael. All in all a big improvement for Mendes, although maybe he should drop the device of bookending his movies with a cheesy monologue from the main character. The narration here is from Sullivan junior. He ends with some platitude on the love between father and son, and an anti-gun message: "And that was that last time I ever held a gun." How does he know? His voice is still that of a child. 7/10. |
| THE ROAD TO PERDITION Director: Sam Mendes Producers: Sam Mendes, Richard D. Zanuck & Dean Zanuck Screenplay: David Self |
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