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GHOST DOG Send This Review to a Friend
Writer-director Jim Jarmusch's strange but often effective movie combines satire and mystique to tell a tale of a stoical African-American hit man who is obsessed with samurai warriors and follows a samurai code of ethics, attitude and technique as he goes about his grim tasks for mobsters. Ghost Dog, as he's known, gets his orders via carrier pigeon from a gangster whose life he once saved. Forest Whitaker, who masters the title role character concept with perfection, moves with quiet resolve in the weird world in which Ghost Dog carries his assortment of weaponry in an innocent looking case.
A scene in which the mobsters, an ignorant lot, meet to discuss business delivers the kind of humor sadly lacking in the much more pretentious effort at satire, "The Whole Nine Yards." Jarmusch's film has pretensions of its own, but in a much more offbeat vein. There is a studied air about the film as Ghost Dog proceeds with the utmost gravity and solemnly lives up to his professional code. The action is interspersed with philosophical passages from "Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai," Ghost Dog's bible, and the quotes grow somewhat tiresome.
The plot builds toward the ultimate violent resolution, with many amusing incidents and complications along the way. The film works well up to a point, but the need to follow the samurai angle to the bitter end extends the film beyond what the concept can handily support. It is basically a slim, comedic idea, but the on-target acting, including by John Tormey, Henry Silva, Cliff Gorman, Richard Portnow and Tricia Vessey, and the carefully created urban atmosphere abetted by Robby Muller's cinematography combine to give "Ghost Dog" a special aura, even though it will hardly be to everybody's movie-going taste. An Artisan Entertainment release
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