Road to Perdition (2003, VHS)

When you stare into an abyss, the abyss stares also into you. Friedrich Nietzsche The latest in a long line of Hollywood tributes to the American gangster, Sam Mendes makes a memorable, if slow, excursion on the broad road traveled by veteran actors Tom Hanks and Paul Newman. Restricting his palette largely to somber grays, blues, browns - punctuated by inky shadows in the rain drenched landscapes of the 1930s Midwest - Director Mendes (American Beauty) has rolled a winner in the story of erstwhile hitman Mike Sullivan (Tom Hanks) on the run from a kill crazy gunsel likely based on real life..

Bogart. Cagney. Hanks. Hanks? Tom Nice Guy Hanks? Yes. In Road to Perdition, our generation s Jimmy Stewart gets mean and cold-blooded as he attempts to stretch his apple-pie image. While he lacks some of the rat-a-tat-tat brutality of classic gangsters like Bogart and Cagney, Hanks slips into the role of a revengeful Depression-era hitman as easily as he does his other good-hearted characters. Henry Fonda did the same thing when he appeared as an ice-veined gunslinger in Once Upon a Time in the West. Like Fonda, Hanks wants to prove he can be good as a bad man. It s really not as sudden a...

Sam Mendes is two for two with me. While I liked American Beauty much more than this one, at the end I had a vague Yeah... And? reaction. At the end of The Road to Perdition , I had a similar reaction, only it was very distinct. Road to Perdition is nothing if not a simply gorgeous movie. Whatever Mendes may lack as a storyteller (or story with a point teller), he more than makes up for in his technical abilities as a director. There are more nearly perfect scenes in this movie than in anything in recent years, save perhaps only Gosford Park . But, simply gorgeous , despite accepted theories.

I don t like mobster movies. Or books. Or TV series. For some reason the whole mobster concept bores me enough that I generally avoid these things like the plague. Now I must eat a big helping of proverbial crow, as I quite enjoyed Sam Mendes sophomore directorial effort Road to Perdition, despite (or perhaps even because of, who knows) the fact that it s dripping in mobsters. Tom Hanks stars as Mike Sullivan, who works for local mob boss John Rooney (Paul Newman). In grand soap opera tradition (no kidding, this same story played out on General Hospital), Sullivan was taken under the powerful.