Two things made the news when Road to Perdition was initially announced. The first - the story that really got the headlines - was that this would be the film in which Tom Hanks would finally get to play the bad guy. The second, which didn’t get quite as much coverage, was that Sam Mendes would direct, finally following up his Oscar-winning debut, American Beauty.

Like most entertainment journalism angles, these stories were basically true but a tad misleading. To take them in reverse order, yes, this would be Mendes’ second feature, but only a follow-up to Beauty in the sense that one came after the other and both are about families. As for Hanks’ role, he certainly plays the bad guy in terms of his job description: Michael Sullivan, his character in Road to Perdition, is a hit man for the Irish mob in Depression-era Chicago.

But the question of whether he is the bad guy is something that the film resolutely refuses to answer. “As an audience,” notes Mendes, “we just don’t know if this is somebody who - without wanting to be too simplistic - is a good man or a bad man from the beginning of the story to the end.”

director Sam Mendes on set with Paul Newman, who plays Chicago gang boss Mr Rooney.

This ambiguity apart, it is not hard to see what attracted Mendes, with his extensive stage background, to the film: Road to Perdition has all the makings of a classical tragedy without ever losing sight of the narrative drive that makes it successful in movie terms.

Like so many hit movies these days, the film is adapted from a comic - or, to give it its polite term, a ‘serialised graphic novel’. But there are no supernatural elements, no superheroes and no intergalactic warriors in this story. Instead, Max Allan Collins (who wrote the original graphic novel) and Richard Piers Rayner (who did the illustrations) took advantage of the stripped-down, mythic world that the format encourages to tell a story about two fathers and two sons on the road to hell. Hell is their destination both literally (Perdition, the titular town for which they are all heading, is a synonym for hell) and metaphorically: everything they believe in is about to be destroyed. Either way, there is no turning back, and the screenplay by David Self (Thirteen Days) preserves the hellish simplicity of the scheme while fleshing out the characters into real people. It also provides Hanks’ Michael with a chance to redeem his relationship with his son through one final, climactic act.

“David has made some clever additions to the graphic novel,” says Mendes, “but it remains an incredibly simple, powerful story. At its heart, there is the father/son relationship. But it is also a serious gangster movie set in what I consider to be the last mythic American landscape - the thirties, the Depression era, when there was still space to lose yourself in the vastness of America. So there is this amazingly varied and enormous canvas on which to tell the story. And, as a narrative, it has a very clear linear drive: it doesn’t stop. It moves relentlessly forward, and it has this fascinating central character who is morally ambivalent.”

In search of a New Deal: Tom Hanks as Michael Sullivan with his son, Michael Jr (Tyler Hoechlin)

Road to Perdition’s central character is Michael Sullivan (Hanks), who has been raised from childhood by Mr John Rooney (Paul Newman), the godfather of the Irish mob in Chicago (and woe betide anyone who doesn’t use the ‘Mr’).

On the surface, Michael lives a very ordinary life with a nice house in a comfortable suburb. He has a wife and two children. He is happy: we need to know this before fate blows it all away. As in all good tragedies, we get a brief glimpse of heaven - of Michael’s happiness - before the mouth of hell opens up. But then the dream is quickly destroyed and Michael and his surviving son (Michael Jr, played by newcomer Tyler Hoechlin) are travelling down a dead-end road to revenge and tragedy.