Road to Perdition

I wrote about WTF Syndrome when I reviewed ‘Snatch’ a while back. WTF Syndrome is when you tell someone, usually very sheepishly, that you’ve never seen a certain film and their patented response is an incredulous “what the fuck?”

Usually, though, there’s a good reason why you’ve never seen the film in question. In my case, with ‘Snatch’, it was because I was influenced by a raft of reviews which painted it as just another iteration of ‘Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’ only on a bigger budget. Which it kind of is and kind of isn’t but is kind of missing the point.

(This, I hasten to add, was back in the day when I was influenced enough by the mainstream critics to make my viewing choices based on their say-so. This was also back in the day when I actually had disposable income and could have just gone to see anything and everything regardless. God, I could give the me of two decades ago a right slapping for not seeing more movies. And not buying a sports car. But I digress.)

When ‘Road to Perdition’ was released in 2002, expectation was high. Sam Mendes’s debut ‘American Beauty’ had cleaned up critically and commercially, bagging six Oscars. It was acute, acidic, brilliantly observed and littered with terrific performances, including a career best from Kevin Spacey. ‘Road to Perdition’ had a lot to live up to. Ads were everywhere. I lost count of the amount of times I sat through the trailer. It looked like a showreel for cinematographer Conrad L Hall. I didn’t know if I could take Tom Hanks seriously as a gangster. Early reviews suggested it wasn’t a patch on ‘American Beauty’. People whose judgement I trusted saw it and gave a shrug of the shoulders. I didn’t bother going to see it. Nor, for nine years, did I have the urge to rent the DVD or catch it on TV.

A couple of weeks ago, I was given a lend of the DVD. I sat down to watch it over the weekend, the mid-way stretch of an offbeat triple-bill that started with ‘Messiah of Evil’ and ended with ‘The French Sex Murders’. Comparatively speaking, ‘Road to Perdition’ boasts greater narrative coherence than the former and somewhat higher production values than the latter. And for the most part I enjoyed ‘Road to Perdition’ – it looks great, there are a triumvirate of excellent supporting performances from Paul Newman, Daniel Craig and Jude Law, and a rain-soaked set-piece towards the end is bleakly iconic – but watching it inbetween two B-movies threw something into sharp relief.

‘Road to Perdition’ is essentially a man-on-the-run narrative powered by the embittered heart of a revenge movie. Adapted from the graphic novel by Max Allan Collins, the material cries out for down-and-dirty B-movie treatment. The story is boilerplate: Michael Sullivan (Hanks), a mob enforcer who tries to keep his family separate from his working life, goes on a strong-arm job with his boss’s loose-cannon son Connor Rooney (Craig); Sullivan’s son (Tyler Hoechlin), curious as to what his old man does, sneaks along for the ride; Rooney goes apeshit at the job and blows someone away; Sullivan Jr witnesses it; Rooney goes over to chez Sullivan to whack the kid but ends up murdering the uninvolved members of the family. Sullivan and son go on the run. Connor’s father, ageing patriarch John Rooney (Newman), reluctantly enters into an agreement with fellow mobster Frank Nitti (Stanley Tucci) to shelter Connor and engage the services of photographer/hitman Harlan Maguire (Law).

At 90 minutes, fast and nasty, this could have been as cynically brilliant as Sam Mendes evidently wanted it to be. As it is, the running time is just shy of two hours. And it’s not like Mendes or scripter David Self need those 118 minutes to work on the characterization, since virtually every character is resolutely one-note. Sullivan is a professional enforcer who just happens to have a family. John Rooney is the creaky but charismatic head of the family. Connor is the wild card. Harlan is the stop-at-nothing psycho who enjoys his work a bit too much. There’s some gumph at the start about how Sullivan owes John so much and how John always thought of Sullivan as a son, but it’s never explained or explored. Quite why the schism between John and Connor came to pass is never explained or explored. The repercussions of Sullivan Jr surviving the massacre he inadvertently caused is never explored, except for one perfunctory scene where Sullivan angrily tells him it’s not his fault.

Ultimately, all ‘Road to Perdition’ is about is how Connor Rooney fucks over Michael Sullivan and how Michael Sullivan manoeuvres in order to (a) protect his son and (b) get revenge. And when Law is onscreen, all shark-like smile and twitchy menace, the film moves and grooves in an effectively nasty way. The rest of the time, though, everyone seems to be conscious that they’re working with an Oscar-winning filmmaker. Whole sequences have “prestige picture” and “Oscar clip” stamped all over them. The pace sometimes flags to the point of funereal. Thomas Newman’s score alternately drops to a hush and swells to a crescendo. ‘Road to Perdition’ is a depression-set gangster movie that is too concerned with straightening its tie, shining its shoes and practicing its speech for the awards ceremony when it ought to be liquored up on moonshine, grinning round a fat cigar and firing a tommy gun in the air from the running board of a Ford sedan.

Cars 2

When ‘Cars’ opened in 2006, the critics were lukewarm. The main bone of contention seemed to be that it wasn’t as good as ‘The Incredibles’. Which it wasn’t. That said, I preferred it to ‘A Bug’s Life’ and ‘Finding Nemo’, the brilliance of which is punctured, in scene after scene, by the irritant that is Dory (the second most annoying character in the Pixar canon; we’ll come to the first in a minute).

‘Cars’, ultimately, is a decent film with a terrific ending. Aesthetically, its anthropomorphism of human traits, personalities and nationalities into automobiles throws up illogicalities left, right and centre – as Bryce muses in his excellent review on Things That Don’t Suck, “I wouldn’t be the first to wonder if there are not piles of human corpses just offscreen” – but once one rationalizes this in the context of John Lasseter’s love of ’50s Americana, a time as much defined by the fins, gleaming chrome and whitewall tyres of its cars as by its music or its fashions, then one can settle back and enjoy a homely tale of a race car who learns to slow down. ‘Cars’ has plenty to offer: incredibly beautiful visuals, some great supporting characters (the banter between Sarge, a 1940s US Army jeep, and Fillmore, a hippie VW Microbus, is priceless), a finale that tells the kids that, actually, winning isn’t all that important, and an end-credits sequence that transposes the film’s anthropomorphism to Pixar’s previous outings in a montage that’s arguably wittier and more inventive than anything else in ‘Cars’.

I can understand the hesitation to embrace ‘Cars’ as wholly as the ‘Toy Story’ trilogy, ‘The Incredibles’ or ‘Ratatouille’ – but it’s still a film I have a lot of time for.

When ‘Cars 2’ opened last month, it was to the absolute all-time worst reviews in Pixar’s history. Which is kind of understandable given that a whole lot of folks were ambivalent about the first one. The question of why Lasseter was so committed to the project when, say, ‘The Incredibles 2’ or even ‘Ratatouille Part Deux: The Masterchef Years’ would have been a far safer option.

But commit to it Lasseter did and, for all that I enjoyed the manic energy of the film’s last half hour, it was in many ways a bad decision. Don’t get me wrong: I wish I could thumb my nose at the naysayers and declare ‘Cars 2’ a jewel in Pixar’s crown; I wish that all the things I enjoyed about it (Pixar just keep raising the bar visually; there are some inspired in-jokes; it’s a U-rated film that has a “your mother” moment) outweighed the faults. Hell, I’d consider it acceptable if the fun and flaws simply balanced each other out on the scales of critical analysis.

Unfortunately, there are two things about ‘Cars 2’ – and they are inextricably interlinked – that present an almost insurmountable problem:

1. Fucking Mater.

2. It’s a Bond movie. With talking cars.

Or, tying those to together in one unholy bundle the way the script does: it’s a Bond movie with talking cars in which Mater gets his secret agent funk on.

I could end this review right here and I think we’d all be au fait as to what’s wrong with this movie.

For the defence, the fact that it’s a Bond movie doesn’t bother me all that much. Bond movies lend themselves well to satire, particularly the Roger Moore entries which about one micrometer from being cartoons anyway. The mild controversy about the amount of shoot-outs doesn’t bother me either: there were men with guns providing a threat to the protagonists of ‘The Incredibles’ and nobody whinged about that. It does bother me that ‘The Incredibles’ has already ticked the Pixar-spoofs-Bond box and that the material mined by ‘Cars 2’ would have worked a lot better as an ‘Incredibles’ sequel. (Seriously, Mr Lasseter: ‘Incredibles 2’, any time you’re ready. I really want to know what the deal is with the Underminer.)

It also bothers me that the set-pieces ram home the illogicalities of the anthropomorphism more gratingly than anything in the original. Talking cars in a roadside diner I can just about get my head round. Talking cars getting fitted with new tyres by another talking car assisted by a talking forklift truck that uses its blades to operate air-tools …. okayyyyyy. Talking fucking cars on a fucking oil rig being spied on by another talking car which is balanced on a fucking tightrope - that’s pushing it!

The overall aesthetic of ’50s small town America was the key to the first film. It’s what allows everything else to cohere. ‘Cars’ only functions as movie because of Radiator Springs. Location defines many films; with ‘Cars’, it permits the film. ‘Cars 2’ removes the action from Radiator Springs, and in doing so replaces the peaceable and harmonious values of its predecessor with raucous, over the top action. Yes, it’s called ‘Cars 2’; yes, it features Lightning McQueen and Tow Mater and Sarge and Fillmore and the rest of the gang (except for Paul Newman’s Hornet Hudson, whose absence is, credit where due, sensitively acknowledged in an early scene); yes, they’re all demonstrably the same characters. But ‘Cars 2’ exists in an entirely different fictive universe to ‘Cars’ and it’s this as much as anything that makes it such an awkward, unsatisfying viewing experience.

The second problem, as mentioned several hundred words ago, is Mater.

I will not speak of Mater.

I will give the nod to the entertaining and likeable new characters – the suave Finn McMissile (voiced by Michael Caine) and the elegant, albeit inelegantly named Holly Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer). I will mention the nifty portrayal of the villains (the monocled Professor Zundapp is spot on). I will high-five anybody involved in the production for the last act piss-take of the Royal Family and the unmitigated chaos the protagonists wreak through the centre of London.

But I will not speak of Mater. I owe it to my blood pressure not to.