Road to perdition, 2002, Sam Mendes

Revenge, payback, retribution, retaliation, vengeance or simply justice.

What does lead a man to act in this way?

1931, Mike Sullivan, a parent of a good family living in USA works for the Irish mafia in Rock Island. His employer, John Rooney provides him and his family stability and a good social status in exchange for killing people.

But this idyllic life changes when Sullivan’s son discovers his father for who he really is. After Sullivan’s family being killed, he and his oldest son manage to flee their home and start from scratch.

Making their way to Chicago is not easy at all, but basing his film on the novel from crime writer Max Allan Collins, Sam Mendes manages to transmit feelings through silence and attain to get the message he wants to convey across to spectators. The strength of both Sullivan and his son is in personal relationships of trust, love and complicity between them, while characters like Rooney symbolize the two sides of the same coin, both affectionate and ruthless boss and taking on the role of father and enemy at the same time, trying to defend their interests under all circumstances.

The farmers they find in their way and their help and support is vital for the main actor and his son. In fact, if they wouldn’t have helped him, Sullivan would had died, so this happening shows the great importance of money in that Sullivan would have never imagined people acting in good faith as they do.

The portrait of a cold, damp and dark world during the Great Depression fits with the character of Jude Law, an assassin on the mafia’s payroll. This charismatic is taken by Mendes to reinforce the last link on Sullivan’s chain to take revenge on those persons who have taken him to perdition.

What seems to be a simply gangster film turns out to be a cinematographic masterpiece in which spectators are shocked by how they get on with an small-minded person who, after all, brings forth love.

“I saw then that my father's only fear was that his son would follow the same road. And that was the last time I ever held a gun. People always thought I grew up on a farm. And I guess, in a way, I did. But I lived a lifetime before that, in those six weeks on the road in the winter of 1931. When people ask me if Michael Sullivan was a good man, or if there was just no good in him at all, I always give the same answer. I just tell them... he was my father.” Mike Sullivan Jr.