ROAD TO PERDITION

Revenge is “the action of inflicting hurt or harm on someone for an injury or wrong suffered at their hands”. Rancour is “bitterness or resentfulness, especially when long standing”. Throughout human history, these two feelings have made millions of people suffer, be unhappy, and, the worst thing, die. Road to Perdition, a film released in 2002, is a very good example in which revenge, rancour and violence lead the main characters to a situation of bitterness, fear, sadness or what is the same, to “perdition”.

Michael Sullivan (Tom Hanks) is a hired gun who works for John Rooney (Paul Newman), an Irish man who belongs to Al Capone in Chicago and has brought up the orphan Michael. The biological son of Rooney is Connor (Daniel Craig), a jealous and selfish man who hates Sullivan and always tries to destroy him. One evening, gripped by curiosity, Michael’s son, Michael Jr. (Tyler Hoechlin), hides in his father’s car and witnesses the murder of a man at the hands of his father and Connor. After that, although the young boy promises not to say a thing about what he has seen, Connor takes advantage of the situation and tries to destroy the whole Sullivan’s family. However, he only succeeds in killing Sullivan’s wife and little son. After finding his family dead, Sullivan and his son get involved in a vicious circle of vengeance and violence which will end in “perdition”.

Violence is one of the main topics of this film. In the previous film we reviewed, violence was also an important matter but in that case it was related to racism. Now violence is related to thirst for revenge and rancour. Michael Sullivan is a hurt man who devotes his time to make a lot of people pay the damaged they have caused to him and his family. In the film, we learn that, after all, violence and weapons won’t take us anywhere and that the only thing that revenge and rancour will give us is a broken and sad life.

Another recurrent matter in this film is the relationship between a father and his son. Michael Jr. is a young boy who loves and admires his father. Sullivan is a busy man and, at the beginning of the film, we can see that he doesn’t pay as much attention to his son as the little boy would want him to. After all, their relationship becomes closer and Sullivan realises that he has been wasting his time at working instead of paying attention to his family.

To conclude, “Road to perdition” is a very good film in which we learn that revenge and violence don’t lead us anywhere and that sometimes we have to pay more attention to important things such as our family or our friends because we don’t know how much time we’re going to have them. Finally, I would like to highlight the end of the film in which Michael Jr. says: “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”. I think this sentence is the best example of the love that Michael Jr. and, I think,  all of us have for our father.