Inflated, arty, but satisfactory reworking of an old gangster-film formula. The sense of raising the bar (in the fashionable phrase) seems quite ostentatious at the outset, with its unmistakable evocation of The Godfather. These are Irish gangsters instead of Italian, and they are gathered for a wake instead of a wedding; but the sanctity of the family and the strict demarcation between home life and professional life are very much the same: the pistol that Pa unstraps and puts down on the bed before supper is not meant for the eyes of his eldest (named, in a further echo of the Corleone clan, Michael), for whom the father has higher hopes. The film never loses its air of grandiosity, of outgrowing its trimly tailored britches; yet it does find its stride, right around half an hour into it, as a ritualistic genre piece, a twice-told tale of underworld revenge -- you hit me, I hit you back, and back, and back -- set in motion when an inquisitive twelve-year-old, his imagination stoked by Lone Ranger dime novels, stows away in the rear seat of his father's car, to find out what the old man gets up to on those mysterious nocturnal errands. Director Sam Mendes, in his sophomore effort after American Beauty, unfailingly rises to the occasion in the scenes of violence, adopting a variety of approaches and vantage points to keep the scenes fresh, resisting the urge to charge into the thick of it. And although the anti-Godfather finale (at the end of a blessedly non-epic running time) may be a bit soft-hearted, even arguably self-contradictory, it doesn't really ruin anything. There's really nothing much to ruin. This is not, for all its striving, a "great" gangster film. But it's at least a genuine one, a generic one. Its ordinariness, odd to say, is its primary source of strength. The striving for greatness weighs it down as much as pushes it upwards. With Tom Hanks, Paul Newman, Jude Law, Daniel Craig, Stanley Tucci, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Tyler Hoechlin. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd