As a standalone All Honky Caper, Road to Perdition is technically superb yet otherwise unremarkable; as an adaptation of Max Allan Collins’ gritty graphic novel, it’s an unequivocal failure. Sam Mendes surrounds himself with talent and hopes that Conrad Hall’s shadowy, deep focus anamorphic photography, the lush art direction, snappy period costumes and Thomas Newman’s score will create a fair enough substitute for an engaging plot. If they had kept to the original story instead of fucking around with it to the point where they might as well have optioned a different property, Road to Perdition would have been one of the greatest action movies ever. Instead, it’s a boring, glacially paced ‘mood piece’ without any tension, inherent drama or, worst of all, any action sequences whatsoever.

The source work is a potent blend of gangster myth and truth, with many historical figures interacting on the sidelines as Mob enforcer Michael O’Sullivan wages a single-handed war on his former Mick employers after they kill his wife and one of his kids. He roams the country in a beat-up roadster with his teenage son, ripping off ‘dirty banks’ where Al Capone launders his money and occasionally getting into epic firefights. Sure, it’s nothing but a rehash of Koike’s Lone Wolf and Cub, and Collins is a bit too obvious about his influences (during one gun battle, O’Sullivan slides down a banister while firing two pistols), but the story is as fun as it is trashy, whipping by in a flash and looking great while doing so.

Road to Perdition. as Mendes’ followup to the mysteriously acclaimed American Beauty, still looks great, and has a topnotch cast, but David Self’s script is a complete hack job. Paul Newman and Daniel Craig play father-and-son Mob brass (name unwisely changed from Looney to Rooney), and the two scenes they share are fantastic. As villains, they’re uncommonly sympathetic. Too bad Tom Hanks, as the hitman with the heart of gold, is such an ineffectual presence as ostensible “hero”, his teenage son is the most passive protagonist ever, and Mendes hasn’t a clue how to handle the handful of violent sequences that remain. This brings us to the fatal flaw: Jude Law as a terminally quirky assassin who loves to photograph corpses. He replaces the armies of faceless thugs who, in Collins’ B&W pages, seemed to appear out of nowhere and spared no innocent bystander.

What remains after countless alterations is a chase movie without an ounce of urgency or suspense, a revenge movie with only minimal, artsy revenge, a ‘family drama’ that, for all its time spent showing characters brooding in dark rooms musing about Fathers and Sons and Original Sin, has no emotional resonance whatsoever. It’s clear that Dreamworks thought they had another chunk of juicy Oscar Bait dangling on their hook and tailored the story to make it “More Substantial”. By doing so they drained every drop of life out of what should have been a cheerfully amoral, ultraviolent, unpretentious gangster epic directed by John Woo. Too bad he was laying an egg with the Jungian clusterfuck Windtalkers at the time this was being made. Could have been a masterpiece.

Joyless and tedious, Clerks 2 is an unsuccessful and pitifully desperate attempt to match the absurdity and satire of its sire, Clerks. The stagy, poorly acted quality of this film arises from the fact that as far as I can tell, Kevin Smith has never worked a day in a fast food joint, and has no understanding of lunch or dinner rushes. But no matter, let’s not let the customers get in the way of his comedy set pieces and touching heart to heart chats that would cause an indigestion worse than any Big Mac.

And therein lies the failure of this piece. The success of Clerks was the job and the customers: the absurdity of ringing customers day in and day out, getting paid next to nothing at a meaningless job shoveling forth worthless products like candy bars, cigarettes, and porno mags. Clerks somehow hit upon the existentialist nature of it all, capturing the zeitgeist of twenty somethings with nothing to show for their cheap labor but a mound of trivial knowledge.

But now it’s 2006, and the whole heap stinks to high heaven. Smith concocts a cockamamie story of a rich, beautiful woman who wants to run away with a loser who has a nothing but a convenience store and a fast food joint on his resume, and said loser realizing he is in love with his manager after they banged one out on the prep table. If that isn’t a misogynistic premise, then fuck it man, I’m going to start punching women and dragging them home by their ponytails.

The only real scene with any sort of honesty involves a man having sex with a mule, and was the only time I actually cracked a smile at this turgid mess. Thank God for Quicksilver…I would have hated myself had I actually paid a dime for this dreary exercise in self-indulgence.

This blaxploitation quickie, made during the waning days of the movement, has a kind of epic scope despite being only 75 minutes long, and is effective despite its 75 dollar budget. At its (hollow) core,Brotherhood of Death wants to examine racial turmoil in the pre-civil rights American South, the societal pressure that made black men willingly enlist in Vietnam, and take a few swipes at LBJ for his pro-Catholic policies and general dunderheadedness. We briefly touch on these, but director/editor Bill Berry chops out every inch of fat to distill this into a simple revenge fantasy: black GIs versus the KKK!

It’s sort of a Z grade Deer Hunter, following three noble Nubian warriors as they anger the Klan, enlist in the Airborne, and learn the ropes of guerrilla warfare in the jungles of Nam. Charlie is the first to feel the brunt of their wrath. A shared joint and a jumpcut later, we’re back in the Bible Belt as it’s ever tightening around these Africans. Since this was made in the 70s, a rape becomes the catalyzing incident to pit the honkeys against the brothers. When the only decent white man, the town sheriff, is murdered by a deputy with an Evil Mustache, it becomes all out war.

You can fill in the blanks from here. What’s surprising is the intelligence in the screenplay and the artful compositions. Most of the action takes place at night (makes the brothers harder to see, y’see), and the lighting does not appear artificial, unlike 90% of cheapo exploitation pics. The barkeep sets up an intelligence network linking all the black servants of the Klansmen. Even the Grand Cyclops loudly plots murder in clear earshot of Rose, his live-in maid. Ambushes are planned and executed, stooges are kidnapped and used as bait. An insurgency proves effective at stopping the occupation, kind of like a zero-budget Battle of Algiers culminating in a grand shooting match. If anything, Brotherhood proves that wearing white sheets and hoods at night severely cuts back on your perception and severely increases your visibility. Also, poisonous snakes are good friends and buses make the best houses.