Grade: B+

Verdict: Hit this "Road."

Details: Starring Tom Hanks, Paul Newman and Jude Law. Directed by Sam Mendes. Rated R for violence and language. At metro theaters. One hour, 51 minutes.

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Review: The sins of the fathers are visited on the sons, and the sins of the sons are visited on the fathers in “Road to Perdition. ”

Gleefully shredding his nice-guy image, Tom Hanks plays Michael Sullivan, a taciturn hit man who lives in a small Illinois city during the Depression. His boss, John Rooney (Paul Newman), is a genial Irishman with a fatherly mien and an irresistible boyo manner. He's introduced generously hosting a wake at his own home for one of his men. Nobody could be more upset about the guy's death than Rooney — even though he was the one who ordered him killed.

As for Sullivan, not only does he know, but he doesn't care. Rooney is more than a boss; he's Sullivan's surrogate father, having picked him off the streets when he was a kid. However, their relationship doesn't sit well with the older man's biological son, Connor (Daniel Craig)cq, a greedy, hotheaded weakling.

The Sullivan family is doing pretty well, despite the Depression, until one rainy dawn when 12-year-old Michael Jr. (Tyler Hoechlin)cq sneaks into the back seat of his father's car so he can see what Daddy does for a living. When Connor stupidly starts a shootout on a routine job, the boy sees exactly what Daddy does: He kills people.

Sullivan swears the kid will never say a word, and that's good enough for Rooney. Or so he says. But Sullivan quickly realizes that, when Rooney's Irish eyes are smiling, he and Michael better run for it.

So begins an odyssey that offers perdition and redemption. Turned down by Al Capone's right-hand man, Frank Nitti (a dapper Stanley Tucci), when he seeks his help, Sullivan and son are on their own as they head for the little town of Perdition (yeah, I know), where the boy's aunt lives. What they don't know is that Nitti, at Rooney's request, has contacted a creepy crime-scene photographer named Maguire (Jude Law), who moonlights as a hit man. (Sometimes he's snapping away at his own victims.)

“Road to Perdition” is directed by Sam Mendes (“American Beauty”) and based on a graphic novel by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner. It is, in many ways, a mournful movie. One "father” who must kill a “son” while another desperately tries to save a son — not just from Rooney and his goons, but from the damnation of following in his father's blighted footsteps.

Mendes tells his story carefully, alternating a thoughtful, muted scene with a bravura blast of violence. There's something not quite real about the film — a tale told, if you will. And indeed it is. In the very first scene, a boy (Michael, it turns out), standing on a beach, tells us that some people thought his dad was a decent person and others said that there was no good in him at all. “But I once spent six weeks with him in the winter of 1931,” he says. “This is our story.”

Their story is also told by cinematographer Conrad Hall's exquisite compositions, which are often as richly evocative as anything in “The Godfather.” Scene after scene plays like a product reel of the Greatest Movie Moments of 2002. Michael is first seen pedaling his bike through a mass of faceless workers, trudging through a delapidated industrial city like something out of “Ironweed.” Men in heavy, bulky 1930s overcoats step out of one of those wonderful “The Untouchables” cars into a driving rain, on their way to kill someone. In Chicago, row upon row of the unemployed sit with their newspapers open to the want ads. One of the best scenes, in which Sullivan realizes, mid-meal, that the man in the next booth (Maguire) is a killer, just like him, takes place in a diner out of Edward Hopper.

Hanks and Newman may not have been gunning for Oscar nominations, but they both are likely to end up on the short list. Hanks isn't eeevil incarnate; he gives Sullivan a gravitas that suggests someone who makes a living doing bad things. Every gesture is deliberate and defined. On the run, he's focused and alert, even as he regretfully teaches young Michael the tricks of the trade.

Newman is Newman, and there's not enough of him. He gives this somber movie whatever fizz it has. He knows exactly who Rooney is, with his deadly ebullience and his guilty, blood-is-thicker-than loyalty to an unworthy son.

As he did in last year's “A.I.,” Law obliterates his leading-man looks. His Maguire has a shambling duckwalk gait, dirty, uneven teeth and wispy, unhappy hair. He's like something that crawled out from under a rock . . . heavily armed.

It's rare to wish that a movie could've been longer, but “Road to Perdition,” despite its slow pace, should've taken a little more time. To feel the film's intended emotional force, we need another couple of scenes with Rooney and Sullivan or with Rooney and his son or, for that matter, with Sullivan and his son before they became fugitives. The missing parts aren't fatal, but they're there.

“Road to Perdition,” a few stumbles aside, is all there. The lighting, the score, the costumes, everything. You can almost see Mendes and company getting together before a single frame had been shot and collectively vowing, “This is going to be something really good.” And it is.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution