Ghost Dog is Jarmusch's best since Down By Law, and the best badass-with-a-gun takin' care of business movie since Sonatine or Unforgiven, a stylish and original crossbreed of the martial arts and mob movie genres that's as lean and cool as star Forest Whitaker is chubby and cool. Jarmusch has ascribed the film's origins to his desire to build a movie around the interaction of actors Whitaker and Isaach De Bankole, and indeed the quirky friendship of Whitaker's hitman/samurai character Ghost Dog and De Bankole's French-speaking ice-cream vendor Raymond, in which neither speaks the other's language but both understand each other's every comment, provides a gentle comic undercurrent to the accumulating violence. Whitaker is just about perfect in the kind of role normally reserved for megastars or himbos, and the rest of the cast is uniformly good. Of the Mafia guys Ghost Dog tangles with John Tormey stands out as his "retainer," Louie. Jarmusch injects understated humor into the gangster scenes that revitalizes their stereotypic aspects, often with wry intercuts of classic cartoon violence. RZA's hiphop soundtrack is crisp and involving, and the movie's pace is deliberate but whimsical. The snippets from Ghost Dog's reading of The Way of the Samurai are sometimes subtly suggestive, sometimes flat, but Jarmusch's eclectic bighearted surefooted cool provides the movie's enduring wisdom.