Though American Beauty seemed to pop out of nowhere, Road to Perdition feels aggressively packaged in that new-Hollywood-cinema-of-quality way. Tom Hanks is the star, of course, and everyone's favorite supporting actor, Jude Law, brings up the rear in a plum role. (The formidable Jennifer Jason Leigh picks up a paycheck here but is discarded early on like so much Kleenex.) Paul Newman enjoys a handful of key scenes as patriarchal John Rooney, but it's young Tyler Hoechlin who actually dominates the narrative as Michael Sullivan Jr., the son of gangster Hanks. Sullivan Sr., you see, is an underworld enforcer with a Sopranos-style family at home. Wife Leigh knows what's up and her silence makes her complicit in the goings-on. Young Michael, however, watches with curious eyes as he tries to figure out what exactly it is that daddy does for a living.

The film's script is based on a graphic novel by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner that was itself inspired by Lone Wolf & Cub, a violent, highly influential 1970s manga epic by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima about a samurai on the run with his infant son. The heightened brutality of both comic-book versions of the story is tamed considerably for the film, which features at its worst a few serious gunshot wounds and some splattered blood. With the arrival of Law, an death fetishist and assassin for hire who poses as a journalist in order to photograph corpses, Mendes ostentatiously showcases a few real-life murder tableaux as seen in period crime photography. Nothing he does manages to convey the hellishness that the story demands. For all its hard-boiled pretensions, Road to Perdition becomes a cloying look at father-son relations in gangster-era Chicagoland.

With Tom Hanks up there on screen it could hardly go any other way. Hanks is a fine actor. If you can see him straining too hard to inhabit this particular character, it may be because you're watching him so carefully for signs of weakness. What really gives him away is the fact that he's physically wrong for the part, with soft, intelligent eyes and a slightly puffy face. The character in the comic is nicknamed "Angel of Death," but Hanks just looks sensitive, like a guy who could at any given moment burst into tears. Mendes and screenwriter David Self seem to have been complicit in de-fanging Hanks's role. When the movie breaks for a father-and-son interlude (the big guy has to teach the kid how to drive a getaway car), the film's self-conscious fuzziness starts to betray its own star-this may be the first fearsome gangster protagonist who could inspire a nice plush giveaway at Burger King. (Even the very popular Tony Soprano is portrayed as a racist hothead.)

Though the A-level stars do give Road to Perdition one hell of a spit-polish, there seems to have been a concerted effort across the board to sand out any grittiness. Conrad Hall shoots many scenes with a color palette popularized by The Godfather, but every shot seems to have been either blocked for the stage or planned in excruciating, airless detail. Thomas Newman is back, damn him, with more gloppy piano tinklings that sap the film of authenticity - the Reading-born Mendes exhibits a near-reverence for the American landscape that should feel naïve to anybody who's actually spent time in the Midwest. Further, he just thinks too hard about this. When the movie should be reaching a rip-roaring climax, Mendes is busy with distracting film-school tricks like pulling the sound of machine-gun fire in and out of the soundtrack in order to underscore a dramatic point. He has a friend, at least, in editor Jill Bilcock (Moulin Rouge!), who manages to make a few of the movie's more violent scenes stand out in sharp and startling relief.

For all my complaints, Road to Perdition is at least entertaining and engaging, and, at 119 minutes, it doesn't overstay its welcome - though it is awfully predictable and falls back on a dopey framing device that allows Michael Sullivan Jr. to state the obvious in voiceover. The film's reductive focus - think redemption for the father if he can manage to save the soul of his son - and status as Hollywood product eventually straitjacket it in a way that's counter to the spirit of its ferocious source material.