Is life another box of chocolate? Perhaps this times a rather bloody and morally reprehensible one. Is this road leading anywhere worth going? Road to Perdition tries so hard to be something that ultimately it can not accomplished that all its efforts seems so prefabricated, so full of mannerisms, so contrived that there is no room for reality or even true feelings to influence or penetrate neither the story narrative or its delivery.
The film feels totally empty at its core, empty of those same values that in spite of the bloodshed and violence of the gangster world it portraits it pretends to highlight: love between father and son, filial trust, honesty. It plays with the audience natural alliance to its main character and its moral ambiguity by casting Tom Hanks as a distasteful hero but giving him an aura of respectability by focusing in his caring fatherly love.
The film's contrived cinematography, the soft focus brown and sepia tones of the photography, the immaculate new repro-sets, the constant intrusion of a highly sentimental sound track that feels the need to emphasise every little nuance of the plot seems to try to make the audience an accomplice in hiding the true nature of the film's main character: a merciless gangster and a miserable b****rd. This is not The Sopranos territory where moral ambiguities and soul searching dilemmas constantly mark the plot neither The Godfather's world where character development and a genuine sense of realism prevails through the questionable characters that inhabits it.
I found the film so incredible distasteful, so sickening in its Hollywood sugary levels of story telling that it makes me seriously doubt about the future abilities to mix popular culture with subtle touches of sensitivity that Sam Mendes so clearly demonstrated in his first film. Let's hope he still has something to say and he is yet not totally lost, at such a tender age, to that road leading to vacuous and meaningless success.and with another Oscar waiting at the end of it.
The film feels totally empty at its core, empty of those same values that in spite of the bloodshed and violence of the gangster world it portraits it pretends to highlight: love between father and son, filial trust, honesty. It plays with the audience natural alliance to its main character and its moral ambiguity by casting Tom Hanks as a distasteful hero but giving him an aura of respectability by focusing in his caring fatherly love.
The film's contrived cinematography, the soft focus brown and sepia tones of the photography, the immaculate new repro-sets, the constant intrusion of a highly sentimental sound track that feels the need to emphasise every little nuance of the plot seems to try to make the audience an accomplice in hiding the true nature of the film's main character: a merciless gangster and a miserable b****rd. This is not The Sopranos territory where moral ambiguities and soul searching dilemmas constantly mark the plot neither The Godfather's world where character development and a genuine sense of realism prevails through the questionable characters that inhabits it.
I found the film so incredible distasteful, so sickening in its Hollywood sugary levels of story telling that it makes me seriously doubt about the future abilities to mix popular culture with subtle touches of sensitivity that Sam Mendes so clearly demonstrated in his first film. Let's hope he still has something to say and he is yet not totally lost, at such a tender age, to that road leading to vacuous and meaningless success.and with another Oscar waiting at the end of it.