Mystery Train Reviews

Jarmush at its height, minimalist while colourful, 3 stories add up to build a city full of decadence and reference, and tender approach to everybody.

Ever since I saw ‘Dead Man’, I have been a huge fan of Jim Jarmusch and I have been trying to watch all his movies for many years. To be honest, none of his other movies impressed me as much as ‘Dead Man’ but they were all interesting to watch and this flick was definitely not an exception. This time, instead of giving us one story, Jarmusch gave us 3 different stories all taking place in a hotel in Memphis. Personally, I’m not really a huge fan of this approach because you often get some half-baked sub-plots instead of a fully fledged tale but here it did work here. Basically, like most of Jim Jarmusch’s work, there was a deliberate slow tempo and it can be either quite mesmerizing or slightly irritating. In this case, it was fine but I can’t say I was really blown away though. I don’t know, it seems that all these quirky characters were fairly interesting but I can’t say that they were really fascinating either. Still, Jarmusch always managed to attract some really nice guys and, for this movie, you had such notorious figures like Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Joe Strummer to play those characters. To conclude, even though it wasn’t really a masterpiece, it was still a decent watch and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you are interested in Jim Jarmusch’s work.