Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai Release Date: March 3, 2000 Starring: Forest Whitaker, John Tormey Directed by: Jim Jarmusch
Is director Jim Jarmusch evil? Some socially responsible viewers may come to that conclusion about four-fifths of the way through his latest film, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, during a brief sequence in which a female police officer is murdered with brutal briskness, after which her dispatcher makes a disparaging comment about women's liberation. The cop killer is one of the movie's villains, and a real mook to boot, but it's nevertheless pretty clear that Jarmusch is going for a laugh here — and he'll get it, at least from socially irresponsible viewers. But social irresponsibility is part of what Ghost Dog is all about. It's also all about honor. And respect for life. And kicking some serious ass. And gangster movies. And getting into the rap group Public Enemy. And living on a planet where the only thing on television is cartoons. And Japanese philosophy. Yup, Ghost Dog is all about an awful lot of things. The movie's title character is an ultrastealthy assassin (embodied by Forest Whitaker, in what may be his pinnacle as a performer) who lives by the samurai code and works for a Mafia operative who saved his life back when he was a youngster. Ghost Dog never botches a hit, but when the mob screws up on one of his contracts — well, the mob decides Ghost Dog's got to pay for it. Ain't life unkind? The mob guys — stalwart Henry Silva and underemployed and underappreciated Cliff Gorman among them — are a riot. Jarmusch takes the standard-issue gangster-movie clichés and raises them to a sublimely absurd level — the backroom dialogue where these wiseguys discuss hip-hop nicknames is worth the price of admission alone. In fact, almost everything in the movie is a genre convention, but Jarmusch never lazily falls back on them — he pokes and prods them, gives them truly surprising quirks, and then he sets them spinning wildly to see where they land. (Which partially explains why Jarmusch isn't content to have one of his villains simply kill a male cop.) Less a pastiche than a mastermix from a cinematic DJ at the height of his formalist powers, Ghost Dog is pretty ill — but it's not evil.
