Shadowboxer
DVD Review: Shadowboxer
Focusing on Mikey (Cuba Gooding, Jr.), the movie follows him from a boy to a full-fledged killer. The brief scenes that show Mikey as a youngster do little beyond establishing that his father wasn’t the best influence, while simultaneously drawing some confusing religious parallels in his story. Fast-forward thirty-years and the movie finds Mikey killing people with a partner (Helen Mirren) who doubles as his step-mother and triples as his lover…huh? Yeah. Their curiously incestual relationship becomes an ultra-creepy version of Harold and Maude (true love in that movie looks like mere sex in this one). Faced with a moral dilemma, the two fail to complete an assignment and instead choose to save a crime lord’s pregnant wife, who was actually the one that put the hit on her. While the boss (Stephen Dorf) learns the truth about what has come of his thwarted contract, the film diverges away from its thesis about Mikey’s solitude and relishes on showing violence and sex. Too bad for this flick, the violence has little to do with the more intriguing aspect of the story and the sex is less the passionate type of Last Tango in Paris and more the kind found in ‘adult’ fare.
Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog is a film about an assassin who follows a strict samurai code of life as he makes his living killing people. It is a fascinating movie depicting one (insane?) man’s voluntary choice of seclusion and isolation. Daniels’s movie almost superficially has Mikey shadow-boxing as a metaphor for his character’s solitude, and the movie never truly penetrates this theme by only moderately touching on it. In contrast, Jarmusch has his assassin internalizing his emotions as he tends to his carrier pigeons on his rooftop, counter-balancing his work with a Zen-like grasp of life’s tranquility. The integration of Eastern philosophy in Ghost Dog is more stimulating than shoving the main character into moments with more physicality and aggression.
The DVD has a commentary track with the film’s director and Cuba Gooding Jr., as well as a ‘making of’ featurette. In this behind-the-scenes documentary it is mentioned that an independent movie like this could never be made at a major studio, but at the finish-line what’s left is a movie boiled down to not much beyond guns, blood, and sex. The music-video-esque cinematography provides some interesting visuals, but often the movie feels too into itself like it’s trying to be independent. The smorgasbord of Oedipal tragedy and religious symbolism enveloped in classical music gives the impression that the film is striving to be unique, elegant, and mature; but its spirit is more mainstream than independent.
Shadowboxer is out on DVD now.
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