Road to Perdition

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Has the juice to get its hooks into you, knock you off balance and keep you that way for two hours. It's a triumph for director Sam Mendes. The passion and precision of his Road work is staggering.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

A truly majestic visual tone poem.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Overflowing with melancholy and tragedy, Road to Perdition is one of the most somber gangster pictures ever made.

New Times (L.A.) Robert Wilonsky

This movie would be worth feting in any season. It's wrenching but never manipulative, stoic but never dull, exhausting but never wearying.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Mendes, in only his second feature (following the Oscar-winning "American Beauty"), has told this surprisingly resonant story with the potent, unrelenting fatalism of a previously unknown Greek myth.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Sam Mendes' much-anticipated second effort after his Oscar-winning "American Beauty" finds him working in a very different key while displaying an even more pronounced attentiveness to tone, genre variations and artistic niceties.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

It's a genteel film with a gun in its pocket, but it's also a film with a universal chord of feeling that keeps welling up from the dark surfaces and violent byways of the plot-and a final confession that both warms the heart and chills the blood.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

It's a dark, brooding, moody film that follows a grim narrative to a logical inevitability and is nonetheless fully infused with a spirit of humanity.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

The movie misfires: It's numbingly cold and soulless, and the zeitgeist stays far beyond its reach. But it's so visually striking you almost don't notice, its relentlessly somber mood has a certain masochistic appeal and, while hardly a career-redefining performance, Hanks is as winning as ever.

TV Guide Ken Fox

This dark, almost mythic heart is what makes the film such an emotionally rich experience.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Results are classy entertainment with little to interest women viewers but very shrewdly and cleverly put together, and probably more rewarding in long-range terms if you invest in Fox or Dreamworks than if you actually see the movie.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Long and winding though it may be, Road to Perdition gets to places that are well worth the trip.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Try as he might, (Hanks) is miscast in Road to Perdition, a partly satisfying gangster drama that amounts to less than the sum of its handsome parts.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

Paradoxically, the closer Mendes gets to his characters, the more remote Perdition becomes. One wishes that his film had as much heart as it does art.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Choice, a luxury of the Corleones, is denied to the Sullivans and Rooneys, and choice or its absence is the difference between Sophocles and Shakespeare. I prefer Shakespeare.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

This is a remarkably good-looking near-corpse of a film, with a pulse that fades in and out.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Romanticizes gangland Chicago, but no more so than other films set in the same period. And, like almost every movie about the mob, this one deals with themes of family, loyalty, and betrayal -- albeit without the intensity of some of the great ones ("The Godfather," "Goodfellas").

USA Today Mike Clark

Impressive yet always self-conscious, Perdition has more class and less sass than any movie in a while.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

There's much that's simplistically grand, worthy, and fine in Perdition. If I yearn for less measured filmmaking that cries out with more reckless despair, it's because I think hell on earth is a meaner, much more interesting, and far less tidy cinematic place than Mendes trusts his audience to handle.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Paved with such good intentions and talent that it's sad to report this lavishly mounted gangster epic - the most serious-minded Hollywood film of the season - doesn't come close to living up to expectations.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

Mendes -- wants to have it both ways, to get close to mob life, but be no part of it. And he keeps us at a dime-novel distance, too. He has made a dreamy, poetic impression of a world that exists only on film and in comic strips, and that has no resonance for most of us.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Subdued yet percolating with suppressed emotion.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

There's something impressive and yet lacking about everything.

Film Threat Rick Kisonak

I'm not sure Sam Mendes' latest is a masterpiece as so many critics are exclaiming but it is very probably the most artful and earnest drama ever adapted from a comic book.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

Mendes' second effort plays like a familiar song transposed to a minor key, a gangland fable soaked in portent and fatalism until its familiarity ceases to be an issue.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

In the scenes between Hanks and Newman, we get glimpses of greatness.

The New Yorker David Denby

For all the beauty and power of Road to Perdition, there's not much spontaneity in it, and the movie's flawless surface puts a stranglehold on meaning. [15 July 2002. p. 90]

Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones

It's a dirty, ugly, joyless world these fathers and sons live in, and for all the passion involved, of retribution and a father's fierce love, Perdition is as emotionally distant as Sullivan. The feelings are all there, just submerged.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

Its seriousness is welcome. It's also a burden the film can't completely surmount.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Visually more coherent than "American Beauty," but despite the burnished mahogany of Conrad Hall's cinematography, Mendes still doesn't quite know how to fill a frame. Like the Hanks character, he's a slow study: The action is stilted and the tabloid energy embalmed.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Feels like a movie that keeps wishing it were something else: an award-winning play, a grand novel, an epic poem, anything but that populist thing we call a movie. Mendes makes movies as if he hates them.

Slate David Edelstein

Law gives a doozy of a performance: He's fond of bulging his eyes, curling his head like a gargoyle, and displaying a set of rotten yellow teeth. This is some of the most flamboyantly bad acting since Brad Pitt in "Twelve Monkeys" (1995). An Oscar nomination would appear inevitable.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

A change from summer fare, but it doesn't make the picture compelling to watch. You won't find the detail of the "Godfather" films or the psychological complexities of Martin Scorsese's gangster movies. The plot holes are big enough to hide Al Capone's illicit millions in.

Newsweek David Ansen

Self-conscious to the point of suffocation.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

On screen, Road to Perdition becomes a lace-curtain shoot-'em-up about fathers and sons. The graphic novel is more kinetic and more powerful than the motion picture.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

Like a date who's primped too long to arrive at dinner with something to talk about, Road to Perdition is beautifully groomed and a perfect drag to be with.