Turning Japanese

Delivered entirely straight, this approach would have yielded little more than an adolescent revenge movie, dressing up the basic theme of, say, The Crow (blood as payment for innocence stolen ... hmm, that's sort of Hamlet, too, isn't it?) with the reverence and mystique of the old Kung Fu series. But this is a Jarmusch film, and the director ladles on winking ironies and surprise chuckles to leaven the morbid proceedings. (Hint: Watch the license plates.) He flirts with the ugly cool-factor of big, phallic silencers and contract killing, but, as surely as the RZA is evolving the rooster strut of rap, he's revising the form of street smartness. By using classic cartoons to comment on the action, he accentuates the ludicrousness of the hits, especially when Ghost Dog stalks Valerio at home, where the aging gangster cops a Flava Flav in his bathroom. The silliness stops just short of cutting in old footage of John Belushi in his topknot and robe.

Unctuous Gorman, crass Ruffini, and the venerable monument that is Silva are all darkly amusing in their astutely caricatured roles, and Tormey's strained expression is priceless, but these characters also represent but one side of Ghost Dog's life: the line of duty. On the human end of the spectrum, we encounter an almost shocking display of warmth. Not only is Ghost Dog respected by his peers (including a fellow samurai, played by the RZA), he is admired by a girl named Pearline (Camille Winbush), with whom he shares a fondness for literature. When she pulls a cheap paperback copy of The Wind in the Willows out of her bag, his sleepy eyes light up. "Toad Hall and all that stuff," he coos. "Man, it was great." When he passes on his legacy to the girl (much as Jean Reno did to Natalie Portman in The Professional), it is with the delicacy of a kindly big brother.

This is why Jarmusch can be so captivating; he boasts an uncanny ability to zero in on humanity under utterly inhumane circumstances. For my money the director was still finding his feet in his 1980s efforts, despite the delight of seeing Tom Waits and the sorely missed Jalacy "Screamin' Jay" Hawkins prancing through his twitchy reveries. With Dead Man in 1995, however, he achieved a rare brilliance, simultaneously crystallizing his unique world view and crafting one of the decade's most vital films. The relationship between Johnny Depp's somber pioneer William Blake and his lively and frank native sidekick Nobody (Gary Farmer, who reappears here for a cameo) felt like a long-neglected bridge being reconstructed. So too, Ghost Dog's friendship with ice cream man Raymond (Isaac de Bankole, who drove a Parisian cab in Night on Earth) instills a dose of hope into a universe of chaos. The men are unable to speak each other's languages, but their instinctive communication is strong. As in Dead Man, we glimpse two friends on a journey that is guaranteed to end, but where Dead Man offered a profoundly haunting sense of closure, Ghost Dog becomes hypnotic, suggesting the cyclical nature of all things. This spirit raises violent entertainment to a higher plane. As for the mean streets evolving into a warrior aristocracy, we'll have to wait and see.