Road to Perdition. Directed by Sam Mendes. Written by David Self from the graphic novel by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner. With Tom Hanks, Paul Newman, Tyler Hoechlin, Daniel Craig, Jude Law, Stanley Tucci, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Liam Aiken. A DreamWorks Pictures release. At the Apple Valley, Entertainment, Flagship, Hoyts, Opera House, and Showcase cinemas.

Tom Hanks makes for an uncomfortable John Wayne. Or is it Jimmy Stewart? He's the closest we've got these days to a Hollywood icon that embodies righteousness, decency, and the American Way. The youngest person to receive an AFI Life Achievement Award, he looked a little awkward balancing Bosom Buddies and Bachelor Party with his sanctimonious do-gooder roles in Apollo 13, Philadelphia, and Forrest Gump, not to mention the Greatest Generation idolatry of Saving Private Ryan.

So before he starts pitching War Bonds, maybe it's time for a change of image (Cast Away came close to it, though nobody cared). How about playing a sympathetic serial killer? (Or did he already do that in Private Ryan?) Sam Mendes follows up his Oscar-winning debut, American Beauty with an adaptation of Max Allan Collins's cult-favorite 1998 graphic novel Road to Perdition in which Hanks plays Michael Sullivan, a hit man for a local chapter of the Capone mob run by lovable old sod John Rooney (Paul Newman, with an errant accent), Michael's benefactor and father figure. Michael's own 12-year-old son, Michael Jr. (newcomer Tyler Hoechlin), meanwhile, is curious about what dad does for a living. He ends up peeking at a different kind of primal scene; that leads to the killing of Sullivan's wife (a short-lived Jennifer Jason Leigh) and his younger son. The killer turns out to be John Rooney's real son, the dissipated and treacherous Connor (Daniel Craig). After some subdued bloodletting, Michael and son must hit the road to Perdition, Michigan, where the boy can find refuge with a handy aunt while dad heads out unfettered to make things right.

In the original book, the names are O'Sullivan and Looney. Those aren't the only changes. O'Sullivan is nicknamed the "Angel of Death" for his remorseless efficiency, and he operates like Clint Eastwood at the end of Unforgiven, except with a kid tagging along. The book is like The Pilgrim's Progress in reverse. Hanks's Michael is more like the dad in Sleepless in Seattle, except heavily armed. Taking Meg Ryan's place here, perhaps, is Jude Law, himself apparently trying to alter his image from that of the Brit pretty boy. Got up like a deranged Stan Laurel with funky teeth, he puts on the film's best performance as Maguire, who's hired by Capone lieutenant Frank Nitti (Stanley Tucci) to take out Michael. A Weegee-like crime photographer gone over to the other side, Maguire is one of screenwriter David Self's more inspired inventions, a link between the worlds of voyeurism and action, a theme that also figures in American Beauty.

Call it American Ugly. Although the Newman-Hanks match-up in the film is what's being hyped, the most compelling tête-à-tête is an eerie confrontation between Michael and Maguire in a diner. Its evocation of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks underscores the influence of cinematographer Conrad Hall (some say he was the real director of Beauty), who eschews the noirish and startling Richard Piers Rayner artwork of the original book and instead takes an art-history approach to the imagery, with tableaux reminiscent of Thomas Eakins, Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper, and photographer Walker Evans.

Mendes also seems to have organized his film visually rather than in narrative or dramatic terms. The whole pseudo-Dostoyevskian, pseudo-Biblical rigmarole of fathers and sons, loyalty and treachery, with its Hanks-friendly, family-values copout resolution, offers none of the punch or clarity of a single shot of a hall full of weary, monochromatic men sitting in rows, each reading a newspaper (talk about being black and white and read all over). Or the sinister, insidious appearances of coins as an emblem of death, or the inescapable doppelgänger of mirrors, or the soothing presence of water in various forms as a teasing promise of life, redemption, and release.

This last motif surges in the film's coda with a sequence that is 2002's most rapturous, a long, undulating shot that combines serenity and horror. As depressing as the film's relentless darkness (and this may be one of the darkest summer movies of all time) might have been, the light suffusing this scene is even more disturbing. When he reaches the end of Road to Perdition, Tom Hanks may not have changed his image, but this image could well change him.