City of Ghosts | Review

Dillon’s debut brings inspiration to the screen; unfortunately, the story needed more fine-tuning.

With his faded black leather jacket, school boy good looks and a shiner to show his character, veteran actor Matt Dillon (Rumble Fish) was the 80’s poster-boy for anti-heroism. After a life in front of the camera, Dillon opens up a new can of worms directs himself and cast fine gentlemen in a story about the path of greed.

With the type of setting that reminds of the soft-core Emmanuelle films, this is a postcard of a beaten-up place with faded out colors, with a freak show of characters which you don’t want to meet with back-alleys that no tourist wants to get lost in. Over-run with stealers, beggars, back-stabbers, murderers and a community of criminals this is a story about being crossed and double-crossed. Almost like a carry-over from the character he portrayed in Wild Things, Dillon brings us the story of Jimmy, a con-man must go to a place of snakes, monkeys and a foreign language to collect his share, except that he doesn’t know who to trust between a bunch of mysterious characters found in James Caan The Way of the Gun, Stellan Skarsgård Dogville and Gérard Depardieu I Am Dina who offers up a slice-of-life type of character who has lived three life sentences in one sweaty hell-hole. It is his relationship to a man who pulls a cart that redeems his soul that he has lost in the same sort of way as his misplaced passport and pair of sunglasses. We get transported from a back-story that tells us that he is bad, into a story that tells us that he might not be as bad and into an ending that tells us that he can symbolically do one good deed for a person who logically didn’t help him out at all as he almost lost his life and technically should have also lost his wallet.

Dillion pays particular attention to creating the sort of ambiance that maximizes the location setting, one that is both exotic and frantic. The visual treatment certainly helps in this matter, with some tight close-ups and angle p.o.v shots that are angled enough to almost give a distorted effect, hence giving the protagonist the feeling of being lost in a calm chaos. It’s clear that Gus Van Sant has had a major influence on Dillon’s cinematic form here, as they worked on the excellent films of To Die For and Drugstore Cowboy. Unfortunately, the effort of ‘getting lost’ in a dead-end place is also happens to be the case for the script, one which places the film’s protagonist and the cast of fine actors in secondary roles into this abyss of haphazard events, where in the finish we get the predictable ending with no big payoffs.

City of Ghosts shows that Dillon has learned a great deal in a movie market that suffers from a zerox type of creativity, at least he attempts to give us something off the beaten path. However, the film suffers from the most is a weak lead role for a film’s protagonist-a sitting duck that waits for things to happen, basically a sentiment which is felt by the viewing audience which is the last thing you want to have happen. Perhaps, Dillon should have chosen the Malkovich route as in The Dancer Upstairs, basically, which is to not show up in your own first directed film and concentrate all of your efforts on the direction of the project.

Rating 2 stars