Upon witnessing a criminal work that done by his father, Michael, the oldest son of Sullivan, a kind man who has been taken by a gang boss named John Rooney, who treats him well as an orphan, struggles against saving his family from the dangerous gang and puts an end for these terrible attack on his family.
What makes the movie pay off is moving pictures of real action and of intimate scenes between man and boy that are all the more moving for being understated.
The top-billed actors deliver: Hanks with his resonant reserve and Newman in conveying Rooney's failed attempt to live up to his self-image as the ultimate just and loving patriarch. [Blu-ray]
Gangsters. Parents. Children. Honor. 'Road to Perdition' is all this and more, perhaps too perfect or too calculated, but with great cinema in it. [Full review in Spanish]
Crisply, starchily self-conscious in its efforts to be a gangster epic. A pretty-enough remote place, with its rain and snow and fedoras and trenchcoats, but it's still a long way from Boardwalk Empire and Miller's Crossing.
While crisply edited and unindulgent, Mendes' work is gratifyingly old-school in its rejection of modern-day stylistic agitation, the better to achieve a slow but inexorable build to its climax.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Chicago Reader
April 17, 2007
Sam Mendes's 2002 follow-up to American Beauty finds him every bit as adept, arty, and Oscar hungry.
