Road to Perdition (15)

Sam Mendes has in Road to Perdition made perhaps the most exquisite-looking movie of this year; there's hardly a frame in it that you wouldn't happily tear out and hang above your mantelpiece. Together with the veteran cinematographer Conrad L Hall (who also shot his first film, American Beauty) and production designer Dennis Gassner, Mendes has recreated a Depression-era America that looks like a sequence of Edward Hopper pictures set into mournful motion. A man framed in the window of a night-time diner, a hotel lobby full of anonymous bustle, a lonely seascape glittering with unearthly purity: these are images to gladden the eye. If only one could feel that they meant something.

Because, however beautiful this movie looks, it is also serenely hollow, an elegant facsimile that never properly convinces us that a drama is going on within. Its inky photography boasts a marvellous lustre, but it has the effect of blotting out the smallest scintilla of spontaneity. It's life-or-death stuff, too: a gangster movie set in 1931 and exploring themes of betrayal, revenge and remorse. How could this possibly be dull? Well, take a look for yourself and see whether its story of fathers and sons is anything but a put-up job, whether it achieves any of the emotional grandeur it aims for, and whether Tom Hanks's much-vaunted "baddie" role marks any real change of direction at all.

Hanks plays Michael Sullivan, right-hand man of the city's mob boss, John Rooney (Paul Newman), and stolid paterfamilias to two young sons. Twelve-year-old Michael Jr (Tyler Hoechlin), the older of them, tiptoes round his father in fear, but is nevertheless curious to know why he carries a gun to work. One night he hides away in the car and witnesses his father and Rooney's unhinged son Connor (Daniel Craig) murdering an associate who has become inconvenient to the boss. His father's secret is out, and the bloom of innocence is irretrievably tainted – worse, Michael Jr's inadvertent snooping has jeopardised his family: "Sons are put on this earth to trouble their fathers," says Rooney, and he should know. The psychopathic Connor, already aggrieved by Rooney's favouritism towards Sullivan, kills Sullivan's wife (Jennifer Jason Leigh, surely a victim of the cutting room) and younger son. So, with half the family lying dead, Sullivan takes to the road with Michael Jr on a mission to avenge and to bond with his guilt-ridden namesake.

Some of these early scenes are finely orchestrated and pull us inexorably into the darkness. Literally, in one instance: having just shot dead Sullivan's wife and boy, Connor suddenly freezes on his way out through their front door. We think that he has seen Michael Jr, who is just returning home, but no, Connor has merely caught his own reflection in the glass, and Michael darts into the safety of the shadows. Later, when father and son reach Chicago, there is a stunning shot of crowds of men in dark coats and hats (it's a clothes movie) walking in slow-motion towards the camera – a lift from Scorsese's Age of Innocence, actually, but if you're going to steal, steal from the best. One feels the urge to be enveloped by this story and its sumptuous telling, and for a while we're borne right along in the shiny black Ford that carries father and son onwards to their fate.

But I can practically mark the scene from which the film begins to sputter and Hanks's mask of cold command begins to slip. The fugitives have stopped by a roadside diner, and Sullivan has gone in to eat. At the next table is a man named Maguire (Jude Law), a hitman who likes to photograph corpses – and who has been hired to kill Sullivan. The latter realises the peril, but plays along with the stranger to buy himself some time, and Hanks, up to this moment morose and withdrawn, slips into that modest, aw-shucks geniality on which he has made his name. And right there he becomes impossible to believe as a mobster thug. Suddenly the eyes, the very shape of his face, look wrong for the part. Hanks may have liked the idea of playing a bad guy, but he's ended up playing the hero again under a different guise. The only truly unpleasant thing about Sullivan is the ratty little moustache that creeps along his upper lip.

From this point the film careens into a gangster fantasia (it's actually based on a graphic novel) that makes those comparisons with The Godfather such a joke. The Sullivans begin a county-wide spree of bankrobbing – American Booty, if you will – with little Michael Jr deputed to drive the getaway car. The Godfather? This is more like Bugsy Malone. Nobody gets killed, nobody tries to stop them. Their only pursuer is Maguire, who finally tracks them down to a hotel and in the ensuing battle falls wounded, a perfect opportunity for Sullivan to finish him off. Incredibly, he doesn't. Violence in Road to Perdition is either ignored entirely or else finessed into a show-off setpiece, like the ballet with bullets set on a rainswept street at night: all we can see is the flare of gunfire and bodies collapsing in slow motion, and all we can hear is Thomas Newman's music playing soulfully over the top. Gunplay has been lyricised by the best (Coppola, Peckinpah), but I can't remember it ever being quite so affectless.

A little perspective, please. This is only Sam Mendes' second film, and after American Beauty an encore was always going to be tricky. He will make better movies in time. This one, however, is a dud. What's most disheartening is the way the aesthetics squeeze the life out of everything; the picture is crumpling like a wounded airship, and Mendes hardly notices.

There's the ghost of an interesting relationship between Sullivan and old man Rooney, but it remains frustratingly undeveloped, as does the idea of Jude Law's death-dealing photographer. The penultimate shot in the film is of a sunlit room in which a camera on a tripod stands between two men lying dead: a dig at Hollywood, or at our own fascination with bloody murder? There's no telling. It's a beautifully arranged still life, like the movie itself; the stills look great, but the life's gone missing.