YMMV / Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • More than one actually. There are a couple interactions with seemingly unrelated characters. Such interactions include the men in red, the park freestyle rappers, the would be mugger getting roundhouse kicked (by Shi Yan Ming).
  • Ghost crosses paths with a man wearing all army gear played by the RZA, seemingly building to a showdown. When they meet they merely greet each other in a fashion that insinuates this man may also be a contract killer and part ways^note "Power Equality"/"Always See Everything" Note what the first letters of the words spell.. This person is never seen nor mentioned again.
  • Ghost Dog encounters two strangers in the countryside who have killed a black bear out of season. He avenges the bear by killing both hunters without as much as a blink, arguing that the ancients saw bears as equal to humans.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Secondary characters Louise (for being a polite but enigmatic and troubled Mafia Princess who gets some Smarter Than They Look and Beware the Quiet Ones hints) and Raymond (for being the biggest Nice Guy in the movie and having some funny moments due to the Language Barrier between him and his friend Ghost Dog) are two of the most popular characters for most fans.
  • The man building an ark on his rooftop, the kung fu expert, and the camouflage-wearing man who is implied to be another hitman/modern samurai all only appear for a few seconds but are widely praised for adding a lot of color to the film.
• Faux Symbolism: Ghost Dog has a meeting of the minds with a mysterious dog.
• Genius Bonus:
  • A lot of small details about Ghost Dog's behaviour follow that of a samurai, without any additional exposition provided.
    • He takes his payment from Louie on the first day of autumn, a traditional time when daimyō was providing his samurais with their koku.
    • Another one is the way Handsom Frank is executed. Ghost Dog shoots him first in the stomach, then in the chest, then in the head. These shots follow the same pattern as seppuku, Japanese ritual suicide, in which the first cut with a sword or knife is made across the belly, the second cut up toward the sternum, and finally the suicide dips his head and is decapitated by his assistant.
    • The showy gun twirling used by him is recreation of the shiburi, the traditional samurai sword-cleaning twirl, adapted for handguns.
  • Right before the first scene with Pearline, Ghost Dog is eating an ice cream cone and watching four guys rhyming few benches away. The beat they use is from Raekwon's 1995 song "Ice Cream".
• Magnificent Bastard: Ghost Dog is a soulful, contemplative man wholly loyal to his "master" Louie, a mafioso working for the Vargo family. Ghost Dog performs his assassinations perfectly, escaping without leaving a trace and living his life according to the Hagakure, until the mob decides to have him eliminated for an embarrassing hit. Ghost Dogs wipes out most of the Vargo family, even taking out one major member by shooting him up through the pipes in his sink, ending the film by being unwilling to kill Louie and allowing Louie to kill him to face death on his own terms.
• Misaimed Fandom: Roger Ebert points out that a lot of reviewers complimented the story's various nods to samurai movies without seeming to acknowledge the protagonist is insane.
  "It seems strange that a black man would devote his life to doing hired killing for a group of Italian-American gangsters after having met only one of them. But then it's strange, too, that Ghost Dog lives like a medieval Japanese samurai. The whole story is so strange, indeed, that I've read some of the other reviews in disbelief. Are movie critics so hammered by absurd plots that they can't see how truly, profoundly weird "Ghost Dog" is? The reviews treat it matter of factly: Yeah, here's this hit man, he lives like a samurai, he gets his instructions by pigeon, blah . . . blah . . . and then they start talking about the performances and how the director, Jim Jarmusch, is paying homage to Kurosawa and "High Noon." But the man is insane! In a quiet, sweet way, he is totally unhinged and has lost all touch with reality. His profound sadness, which permeates the touching Whitaker performance, comes from his alienation from human society, his loneliness, his attempt to justify inhuman behavior (murder) with a belief system (the samurai code) that has no connection with his life or his world. Despite the years he's spent studying The Way of the Samurai , he doesn't even reflect that since his master doesn't subscribe to it, their relationship is meaningless."
• Retroactive Recognition: Fans of The Wire and The Sopranos will recognize Jamie Hector (Marlo Stanfield) and Sharon Angela (Rosalie Aprile) in bit parts, the former as one of the Bloods who give Ghost Dog respect and the latter as the woman at the liquor store whose car Ghost Dog steals.