Out on October 23, 2023 in a shiny 4K restoration, there’s nothing else quite like Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. It’s a film occasionally at odds with itself: often imbued with a really interesting look at ancient and contemporary culture, while bogged down by odd, stilted pacing and a narrative that never really imposes itself.

Forest Whitaker starts as the eponymous Ghost Dog, a hitman operating out of an unnamed American city that certainly doesn’t feel distant from New York. Ghost Dog shows us his riskiest hit yet: taking out an associate of his mobster handler Louie (John Tormey) and fronting up to the inevitable gangster backlash when things don’t quite go as planned.

It’s a simple story that consequently should lead to plenty of focus on the characters, setting, and Jarmusch’s classic style of sleek directing. The latter is here in abundance, but the rest of those elements feel quite disparate in Ghost Dog.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what doesn’t click about the film, but its haphazard pacing is certainly a contributing factor. It’s often broken up by short adages from samurai lore, which is logical given Ghost Dog’s subject matter, but leads to scenes feeling more like vignettes than part of a cohesive narrative. That’s equally a problem it faces when the film seems to reach its narrative apex at the end of the second act, at which point you’ll be scratching your head as to where it has left to go narrative. Jarmusch’s script manages to take the ending into surprisingly tender directions, but you’ll often be wondering where the narrative thrust is amid such slow pacing.

That said, the conceit behind Ghost Dog is undeniably novel and fascinating to get to grips with. Melding traditional Japanese samurai practices with late 90s inner-city life, it makes for a very unique setup. Bombastic hip-hop beats arranged by Wu-Tang Clan alum RZA blast alongside discussions of literature and old-school mafia squabbling, but none of these factors ever feel at odds with one another. Instead, Jarmusch assimilates these various cultures to reflect how varied our world is, especially in inner-city areas, and consequently the film has a style and setup quite unlike anything else.

For a film about a hitman, it’s interestingly shy on getting too graphic with its violence. The moments where Ghost Dog has to take someone out feel incredibly matter-of-fact, with no flashiness or action trappings, but rather just the events as they’d occur in real life. Fortunately, Whitaker has made a career off his ability to imbue coldness and emotionlessness into his characters, and that more than fits the bill here. However, it does also mean that we’re rarely, if ever, encouraged to emotionally engage with the protagonist.

It’s no doubt to present Ghost Dog as a blank slate, a modern-day samurai purely dedicated to his life’s purpose, but there’s no emotional anchor in the film to get you attached. The eponymous killer himself doesn’t speak to anyone until a good way into the film, at which point it’s tough to form any connection. He’s no doubt the ‘good guy’ of the piece, at odds with conniving gangsters who are the antithesis of Scorsese’s ruthless mobsters, far more disorganised and quarrelsome.

But in a film with such a unique setup and a fascinating melding of cultures, its originality and charm don’t trickle down to the characters or story. It all looks good, especially in this crisp 4K scrub-up, but you’ll be left wondering whether the concept could’ve best been served in other ways.

★★½

Ghost Dog releases on 4K Blu-Ray on October 23, 2023.