Herald Rating: * * * *
Cast: Forest Whitaker
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Rating: M (violence)
Running Time: 116 minutes
Screening: Rialto
Review: Russell Baillie
You can just hear it. Those folks who have faithfully backed perennially cool director Jim Jarmusch's not exactly lucrative films over the years, leaning across the table and saying: "What you really need is a hit, man."
Disdainfully flicking the ash from his cigarette, Jarmusch drawls: "A hitman. Hmm ... Cool. OK, I see a black guy who's a modern samurai in employ of the mob who must then fight them. We're talking sort of Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai with a few Kurosawa references. And I've had Neil Young on my last two soundtracks. Time for some hip-hop."
Well, however it came about, that, more or less is Ghost Dog. It's as unflashy, cool and multi-referenced as all that sounds, and then some. But it's also gripping, in a slow-pulsed way, as an askew, shoot-'em-up crime flick, while Whitaker shines as the titular character.
He may be a bear of a man wearing David Tua's latest haircut, but his is a performance of impressive physical grace. He's an assassin and a black-belt pigeon fancier (you know, like Brando in On The Waterfront), a loner who spends his free time studying the samurai ways and tending to the birds in his rooftop shack.
That's until he's compromised by the presence of a mob boss' daughter at one of his hits, making him a marked man by his former employers. So it's showdown time - but being Jarmusch that means many a scene of comic absurdity, many of which involve the film's colourful eccentric wiseguys and most of whom make the Soprano clan look relatively thin, young and sane.
Then there's Ghost Dog's best friend, Raymond, the Haitian ice-cream vendor who speaks no English (their sub-titled conversations form a running gag) and young neighbourhood girl Pearline, with whom he forms an unlikely book club.
Those digressions help turn this into a sort of anti-thriller, with many a meditation on loyalty, friendship, honour and ornithology - in between muzzle-flashes.
Like Jarmusch's best films, it creates its own off-kilter world in its own good time and entrances with its deadpan humour and less-is-moreness. But Ghost Dog also intrigues with its pop culture collision. While the samurai/martial arts aesthetic as adopted by hip-hop culture has already been exploited in Jet Lee's Hollywood stinker Romeo Must Die, Jarmusch, helped by an effective atmospheric soundtrack by the Wu-Tang Clan's RZA, offers an alternative spin. It's possibly no more substantial but it feels heck of a lot cooler.
On that score alone, Ghost Dog deserves to be a hit, man.
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
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