Critics reviews

More than just a playful, rich essay in cross-cultural ties in a globalized modern age, Ghost Dog is also a study of a deeply contradictory figure: a man with one foot in the present and another in a past he only knows through literature.

The film, with stoicism and self-assurance, demonstrates how wide-ranging and flexible it is without blustering or back-patting about how many formal languages it's able to speak.

Whitaker makes Ghost Dog a touching and unlikely killer, a mystical force at once noble and foolish—a man so strange and unique he could only have been birthed by a country on the verge of cultural chaos.

Not only are key points in the plot practically incomprehensible, but the plot/story itself is a pretext for a heightened formal sensibility that washes over this film. Jarmusch creates this sensibility through powerful statements of character and by linking highly abstract and disparate cultural details, elements and objects.

It can at first appear a relaxed, droll, minor film – particularly in comparison with the much darker Dead Man. But no detail is wasted in it, and the cumulative effect is, ultimately, deeply moving.

The film is a contemplative disrobing of a lifestyle (hip-hop) in order to give it new clothes, and an attempt to give the action genre pause to reconsider itself. But Jarmusch, with his noble sincerity and real affection, can't begin to give this grisly, somnambulant essay on the cross-cultural matrix of violence born of over-stimulation and numbness a life of its own.

Jim Jarmusch's seventh narrative feature, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, which I've seen three times, may be a failure, if only because most of its characters are never developed far enough beyond their mythic profiles to live independently of them. But if it is, it's such an exciting, prescient, moving, and noble failure that I wouldn't care to swap it for even three or four modest successes.