Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) is about a contract killer working for the mob. Ghost Dog considers himself a samurai; he reads the eighteenth century text Hagakure and believes he owes loyalty to his master, a mafioso who saved his life years earlier. The trouble is that nobody on the other side knows these rules exist. The film is broken up by quotations from Hagakure, and the text on screen builds both the character's world and the film's irony. RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan wrote the score. That is central to Jarmusch's idea of setting hip hop beside the samurai code: two separate systems of honour standing on the same street. Forest Whitaker leads. Ghost Dog communicates by carrier pigeon, and his only friend is a French ice cream seller who speaks no English; the two understand each other without a shared language. It competed at Cannes. It runs 117 minutes. Good for: Jarmusch, genre hybrids, and silent protagonists. Less good for: the pace is very slow and the shifts between comedy and violence are abrupt. The mafiosi are deliberate caricatures, a choice that makes the film feel unserious to some viewers. The ending is predictable because the character's rules are stated at the start.