Writer-director Jim Jarmusch caters to the craving for originality at all costs. The hero is a black hit man (Forest Whitaker) who religiously reads Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai (sometimes he reads passages of it to us right out loud: "Every day without fail one should consider himself as dead"), practices with a samurai sword outside his rooftop shack, reholsters his handgun with the flourish of a yakitori chef, regards himself as a "retainer" to the old Mafioso who once saved his life in an alley fight, communicates with his "master" exclusively by carrier pigeon, and receives payment but once a year for services rendered. His best and only friend is a Haitian ice-cream vendor who understands him perfectly, and vice versa, even though they speak different languages. For pleasure, he chooses to listen, plausibly enough, to hip-hop, but then so does one of the hoary old Mafiosi. The sex-kittenish daughter of another of the Mafiosi has just read Rashomon in paperback, passes it along to the hit man, who passes it along to a little girl in the park, who passes it back by happenstance to its original owner. Pretty much everyone watches cartoons on television and nothing else. One's foremost impression of all this, over and above one's impression of the flaunted erudition of the filmmaker (the cartoon selections are excellent), is of a kind of deadpan absurdism. Which is a polite way of saying that it's ridiculous without being particularly funny: the originality, so-called, is no more than discordant mix-and-match. The juxtaposition of American gangsterism and Japanese feudalism is apt to remind the well-informed cinéaste (whose friendship, especially if he should happen to be French or Japanese, Jarmusch actively courts) of Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai. But it must be pointed out that Melville left the samurai element discreetly in the title, as a subtle allusion, a distant parallel, a faint echo. The literalness of that element in Ghost Dog might more relevantly call to mind such discreditable hybrids as John Frankenheimer's The Challenge or, in the Western genre, Red Sun and the TV series, Kung Fu. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd