I would pay $0.00 to watch this movie, don't waste your time.

    "Road to Perdition" should have been good. The movie stars Tom Hanks, Jude Law, Stanley Tucci and Paul Newman. I hear this cast list and I get excited. All of these actors are very capable and, almost without exception, solid. The film was directed by Mendes, the director who did "American Beauty", a movie which I thought was good, even though I didn't love it as much as the rest of the country. The producers didn't waste all of their money on the talent: The sets looked expensive, and they had to have blown a heck of a lot of money on extras and costumes, if only for one scene of a bustling downtown 1931 Chicago.
    So what went wrong? I'd love to be able to blame one source, but there are so many flaws in this movie that it's impossible to nail down one thing. Start with the idea: The movie is based on a graphic novel. Don't get me wrong, this has been done before with great success ("The Crow"), but that requires a couple of things to jive. First of all, it has to be a good graphic novel. Secondly, one needs a good translation of the graphic novel into a screenplay. Finally, you need a director with the skill to execute it.
    I haven't read the work that this movie is based on, so I can't judge whether or not it was as inane as the movie, but I certainly can state that the screenplay and the director were both terrible in this cinematic debacle. The miserably written dialogue was made worse by the wooden delivery and unbelievable one-sidedness of the actors. Having seen all of the principal actors before (other than the child who played Tom Hanks' character's son, who put forth the best performance of the movie), I am certain that this was not the fault of the actors. When in doubt as to why an actor is dead on screen, blame the director.
    The characters themselves were so incredibly trite and cardboard that it was impossible to identify any humanity in them. They were caricatures of human beings. For example, our introduction (and all of the real character development) to Jude Law's character lets us know only a few details of his personality: He is a perverted hit man who likes to photograph his murders. As for Tom Hanks' and Paul Newman's characters, they are both torn between loyalty to their blood relatives and each other, and both choose their kin rather quickly. This sort of cut-and-dried character development works for mythology, opera and melodrama, but not for a period gangster flick about tough guys and their conflicting emotions.
    Another problem I had with "Road to Perdition" was the visual aspect of it. I know the film was based on a graphic novel, but it was still way too clean and crisp. There was never a speck of dirt on any of the sets, even the dusty back roads looked like postcards. The most "gritty" scenes were two with the photographer/maniac played by Jude Law, and even those had the requisite bright, symbolic colors of a heavy-handed director. When Tom Hanks and his character's son repaint their car by hand in a run-down garage, the car looks like brand new in the next scene. I seriously doubt that a career mob enforcer had the time to study auto body work and teach it to his son between extortion jobs.
    The real sticking point of the movie is Stanley Tucci's character, the big-time Chicago mob boss Frank Nitti. After Tom Hanks steals a trunkload of two-dollar-bills (I am not making this up) from Nitti's mob and murders a profitable business partner from out of town, Nitti allows him to waltz into one of Nitti's safehouses and murder someone under Nitti's protection ... and lets him walk free afterwards.
    Now, according to all the rules of the classic gangster flick, every available double-cross is taken, and it seems very unreasonable that Chicago mob boss Frank Nitti would allow an Irish heavy to get away with both theft and murder in his very own territory. The whole scenario is so ridiculous that it justs puts the whole movie into perspective.
    There are a few cool scenes in this movie, and maybe the die-hard gangster flick fans will like this movie better than I did, but I would suggest watching a movie that the director and the actors actually made a good attempt on instead. This movie is exactly the kind of formulaic drivel that gives Hollywood a bad name. Unlike Shyamalan, another notorious directorial newcomer, Mendes fails miserably to establish anything other than the fact that he had a momentary flash of inspiration on "American Beauty" which has passed with this, his flaccid follow-up.