SAM Mendes, the British director who transferred so seamlessly from London stage to Tinseltown film, seeks the dark heart of America once more.

After the millennium blues and mid-life identity crisis of his Oscar-winning debut American Beauty, he travels to an earlier time of American internal rumbling, the Depression of the 1930s, for a study of the psychology of father-and-son relationships wrapped inside a gangster fable.

A Max Allan Collins graphic novel provides the foundation for Mendes and his cinematographer Conrad Hall's handsome yet claustrophobic, colour-drained, dripping depiction of a rotten Chicago world turning in on itself.

Road To Perdition, a title as gloomy as a starving vulture, takes hitman Michael Sullivan (Tom Hanks) on a long night's journey to hell and redemption after eldest son Michael Jr (Tyler Hoechlin) hides in the car to discover his father is the Angel of Death. The boy is spotted. Bad news. Now the quiet, God-fearing family man with the ruthless gun is compromised. His wife (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and younger child are murdered: two down, two to go. He points the finger at working partner Connor Rooney (a wan Daniel Craig), the feckless son of his employer, revered Irish mob boss John Rooney (Paul Newman), who has always treated right-hand-man Sullivan as one of the family. Until now.

Rooney orders Sullivan's death, and the protection of Connor at all costs by photographer cum assassin Maguire (a mischievous, oddball Jude Law, the one comic-strip tone in earnest company). Time for Sullivan to go on the run with son and gun. Complemented by another perfect score by Thomas Newman, Mendes directs too much with Oscars in mind, a high-brow Spielberg, bloodless by comparison with the Coen Brothers or Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola, who get their hands dirtier in the mire. Here is a film equivalent to a Peter Gabriel album: cerebral, high-concept and bordering on the sterile. Yet the story is told from a child's eye, and turns slushy.

Hanks's venture into the dark side is good on pathos, but with a gun he's like a drummer suddenly moved to lead guitar. Newman is a fantastically charismatic old man; Hoechlin, the young discovery of the year.

This is gangster movie-making with coats that little bit too well cut, like Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy. It never makes it to hell.

Updated: 09:15 Friday, September 27, 2002