Road to Perdition

Or: How Even the Most Direct Road to Perdition Can Lead to Movie Perfection. A visually indescribably atmospheric watch. Precise acting, perfect camerawork and faultless and inventive directing. Sam Mendes filmed so far the most faithful adaptation of a comic book to come to the movie screen so far. Although the storyline is simple, that’s where its strength lies. It could be criticized for being a wonderful shiny load of nothing about father and son finding a way to each other, but that’s not the feeling I get from this. Quite the contrary, for one thing, the scene in the rain is now in my top ten best scenes ever. It just has everything. From emotions, through marvelous production design, immense atmosphere to the actors. And the entire movie is like that, just perhaps not so intense all the while. And that’s pretty good, don’t you think? (02/04/2007)

This film is packed with big names, from the excellent Tom Hanks to Daniel Craig, and the result is a decent retro gangster flick that has a great and quite dense atmosphere in places. What holds me back a bit from a four-star rating, though, is that there is relatively little action for those two hours, the finale is not very intense, and most of the film is a drama that tends to just lean on the gangster genre and actually focuses more on talking. Still, it doesn't change the fact that Sam Mendes and his signature are evident, the filmmaking quality is not lacking and overall the film is very ambitious for its time, it's not unnecessarily demanding and it's "viewer friendly", but I was expecting something a little different. (05/17/2022)

Thanks to Mendes, this atmospheric gangster movie is quite untraditional (for the genre, not for Sam) in terms of visuals and is more colorful than usual. Sort of unusually “beautiful", but still dark. Excellent acting and that revolting creature Jude Law got that trick with the coin down to a T. Road to Perdition has several extraordinary scenes, but Thompson in the rain is enough to give you a heart attack. (01/07/2012)

Based on the successful comic book series by Max Allan Collins. With his film American Beauty, Sam Mendes raised expectations among critics and fans to such a level that he couldn't meet them, no matter how hard he tried. From my perspective, after careful consideration, I prefer Road to Perdition. Sure, in terms of choosing the subject matter, it was an obvious safe bet, but there was also a calculation with American Beauty, albeit a more subtle one. Mendes's gangster film is a compact piece in every way, with perfect cinematography, a strong story, and charismatic characters. Comparing Road to Perdition with what I've seen in the past year, I have no choice but to increase my rating to five stars. Overall impression: 90%. (06/14/2006)

I thought my taste was only oriented towards horror and Asia, this film confirms that my favorite subgenre is also gritty gangster films. Once again, an excellent cast, I've never had my fingers crossed for Tom Hanks like I did here, and as soon as the psychopathic Jude Law appears on the scene you wish him the worst from the first second. I definitely have to highlight the amazingly dark retro style, the intelligent story and the awesome soundtrack, even a tear dropped towards the end. Everything is actually flawless, nothing can be faulted. (11/26/2014)