Road to Perdition: Lots to look at, nothing to see

Could Sam Mendes's second film match his Oscar-winning debut, American Beauty? Yes, say the US critics who are raving about Road to Perdition. No, says David Thomson, it's just a good-looking bore

The release schedule of American movies is very crowded now – everyone wants to get in on the act. But you can see the real event pictures coming a long way off, like mountains on the edge of the prairie. So for months, Road to Perdition has been talked about in hushed terms. There seemed so many reasons for hope: it would be the second film by English stage director, Sam Mendes, who won Best Picture and Best Director Oscars with his debut, American Beauty; it was reported in advance as a classical film noir; it made new, bold demands on Tom Hanks; it co-starred Hanks and Paul Newman, in one of the best roles the veteran has ever had. And, not least, it had a startling supporting performance from Jude Law, the actor now that nearly everyone predicts as destined for major stardom.

And this is what happened as it opened across America on Friday 12 July. In Time magazine, Richard Schickel called it "darkly imaginative and powerfully enfolding". In the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan noted "classic film-making". In the New York Times, Stephen Holden recognised "a truly majestic visual tone poem". Rolling Stone called it "a triumph". In the Journal News, Marshall Fine hailed it as "the best movie so far this year". In other words, the calculations for the 2002 Oscars have begun. And when rhetoric came to reality, in its first weekend Road to Perdition grossed $22.1m, not Spider-Man numbers, of course, but evidence that the good people of the United States reckoned they were getting the real thing, a movie movie out of the top drawer.

Humbug. Road to Perdition is a high-class dud, a wretched piece of self-indulgence, and a merciful moment where the self-esteem of Sam Mendes meets the mud. And a good thing, too. He is far too talented and ambitious to be daunted by my sour words. He may even collect more Oscars and much more tributes. But as time settles in, Road to Perdition will reveal its thick, deadly crust of artiness, just as Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line enclosed and strangled the brilliant life that had existed in Malick's great début film, Badlands. Road to Perdition is the rotting fruit of early glory that a real movie director needs to get out of his system as early as possible.

Of course, it might also signal an unbearably pretentious, hollow career. Which will Mr Mendes prefer?

Why should I be right and all the others wrong? There's no way to answer that except to stress this – and it's something that I've heard most of the critics who love Road to Perdition admit in the last year or two. That in these times of dire film-making, the decent, well-intentioned critic is always hoping for something good. He or she wants to be pleased and excited, not just for the sake of one film but as a way of reasserting the power of the entire medium. So critics are in danger of over-praising something in which gravity, art, and human values are triple-underlined. Road to Perdition is set in 1931, in an unnamed city close to Chicago, and under the criminal control of that city's Mob – the Capone gang. This town is controlled by John Rooney (Paul Newman), a saturnine, chatty old man the twinkle in whose eye never hides the dark lustre of bullets. He has a son, Connor (Daniel Craig), such a jerk and a liar that Rooney has come to favour Michael Sullivan (Tom Hanks), his best lieutenant and a kind of adopted son.

No matter America's economic plight in 1931, Sullivan lives with his wife (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and their two young sons, in a fine house on the edge of town. It's a happy household in its way, with no one ever questioning the stern fatherhood and authority of Michael. He works for Mr Rooney, the boys know, but in just what capacity? The older boy, Michael Jr (Tyler Hoechlin), becomes more intrigued when he realises that his father carries a gun on the job. And so, one fateful night, Michael Jr hides away in his father's car and is there as a witness when Michael and Connor Rooney kill an associate who has earned Mr Rooney's disfavour. The secret life is broken apart. Knowledge has escaped, and so it threatens the order of things and the state of family life.

Rooney wonders to Michael how the boy is taking what he knows. Whether he can be trusted. It's a hard thing for a kid to learn, he says – but then he adds to Michael, but you turned out all right. Sons, he says, are sent into the world to trouble their fathers. We're not sure how real the crisis is. But Connor takes matters into his own hands: he kills Michael's wife (Jason Leigh has no more than a few words in the film) and the younger son, Peter, thinking he has killed his older brother. At which point, Michael and his surviving son take to the road, to seek vengeance or protection from the Chicago mob, to survive, and to bring the father-son relationship to warmer life. In this attempt, their most deadly enemy is Maguire (Law), an assassin who loves to photograph his victims.

To be sure, it sounds promising enough to sustain comparisons with The Godfather. Grant that the dialogue (by David Self) is very restrained; grant that this is a top-line cast; and throw in Conrad Hall as cinematographer. But there's the rub, or the start of it. Conrad Hall is a most engaging man and a very talented cinematographer. Aged 76 now, he has a record that includes The Professionals, Cool Hand Luke, In Cold Blood, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Fat City, The Day of the Locust and Tequila Sunrise. He has always been able to use light the way Sinatra did lyrics. Well, Mr Hall came out of semi-retirement to work with Mendes on American Beauty. Mendes, a newcomer, was frank about all he needed to learn. Hall was a most gracious teacher. And Hall too won an Oscar for American Beauty. I met the two of them at the time of that picture, and there was an unmistakable bond of affection between them. But movie directors become friendly with photographers at their risk.

Road to Perdition is so crushingly beautiful a film that you want to scream. There is a final shoot-out on a rain-strewn street at night, an arrangement of moonlight, the sheen of soaked surfaces, the forlorn tumbling of bodies and the flare of tommy-gun fire that is so graceful, so refined, so pretty that Mendes even turns off the sound-track to let you revel in the visual majesty. You can call it an homage to the great moments of film noir, and to the paintings of Edward Hopper. But whenever you hear that a movie is Hopper-like it's a sure bet that the movie is stuffed, addled and a good-looking bore.

Road to Perdition is based on a graphic novel (by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner), but one of the elements that is original to the film is the character of Maguire. I suspect he's there out of some half-baked notion to draw a parallel between the violence of Michael Sullivan's world and the stealthy art of photography. That is never really explored, just as the family ties in this film are asserted or offered but seldom lived out. I think Maguire is there as a weird kind of tribute to Conrad Hall, and as an inadvertent give-away of how far the cameraman has stolen this project.

Once you find that mind-set, you can hardly watch Road to Perdition without seeing it as the realisation of its own storyboards. The schematics stifle the life and the feeling. The considerable emotional potential of the situation is steadily sapped by the predictability and the visual intricacy of the shots. To take one killing example: near the end of the film, in a house on a sunny beach, Michael is killed. He stands at the window, the glass filled with the reflection of the beach, the sea and his son outside. It's exquisite and it goes on for ever, or until only an idiot can't work out that Michael's killer is crouching behind him in the only vital spot.

If you reckon that that kind of staging is "cinematic", then you and I are in different games. It has been said for years that when a movie director's mind and responsibility go, when he settles for just being visual, then he becomes a cameraman.

And cameramen don't make movies: yes, Greg Toland was vital to Citizen Kane, but Toland before and after never shot a foot of film that had Kane's power. Directors make films. And Mendes has to learn to work with a man he may dislike, a grump and a problem who will compel him to think about character and drama, instead of just arranging them in the moody moonlight.

'Road to Perdition' opens on 20 September