Highest 2 Lowest Is Spike Lee At His Boldest And Most Bewildering
Denzel Washington gives a tour-de-force performance in Lee’s propulsive remake of the Akira Kurosawa masterpiece.
Spike Lee knows a thing or two about the pressures of trying to remake a masterpiece. After his ill-advised remake of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, it was a surprise that Lee would aim even higher to remake High and Low, the exquisite 1963 Akira Kurosawa crime thriller that has left a mark on acclaimed films like Parasite, as well as the police procedural genre at large. But this time, Lee avoids remaking High and Low beat-for-beat, as he did with his Oldboy; instead, his supercharged thriller film Highest 2 Lowest only takes the basic premise of the story and turns it into a frequently bombastic and occasionally baffling, but undeniably Spike Lee movie.
Highest 2 Lowest loosely adapts both Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low and Ed McBain’s original 1959 novel.
Highest 2 Lowest, like Kurosawa’s High and Low, loosely adapts Ed McBain’s 1959 novel King’s Ransom, which followed a wealthy businessman who must pay a ransom to retrieve his young son from kidnappers, only for it to be revealed that another man’s son was mistakenly kidnapped instead. The moral conundrum over whether to still pay the ransom forms the central conflict of both Kurosawa’s High and Low and Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, but the films around that dilemma are very different.
Where Kurosawa’s film was lean and taut, Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest is indulgent and messy … but also utterly electrifying, as you might expect from a Spike Lee movie. Fueled by a tour-de-force performance from Denzel Washington, with whom Lee reunites for the first time in 19 years, Highest 2 Lowest may not be as pitch-perfect as Kurosawa’s, but there’s no denying its raw, explosive power.
Highest 2 Lowest updates the story for contemporary New York City, following Washington’s David King, a high-powered founder and executive of an influential record label. He lives in a beautiful penthouse apartment atop a soaring skyscraper with his loving wife Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera) and adoring teen son Trey (Aubrey Joseph), the latter aged up from the preadolescent child of both the novel and Kurosawa’s film. Paul Christopher (Jeffrey Wright), his chauffeur and close friend, also lives with them. Disillusioned with the increasingly shallow nature of the music industry, King makes a bid to take over his label, secretly planning to renege on the corporate merger with an AI-friendly company, and putting everything he owns into buying out the stocks of his fellow board members. But this precarious takeover is jeopardized when he gets an anonymous phone call saying that his son, whom he just dropped off at basketball camp with Paul’s son Kyle (Elijah Wright), has been kidnapped. When it’s soon revealed that the kidnappers got the wrong boy, King must decide whether to pay the $17.5 million ransom and throw his entire life’s work away, or have an innocent boy’s blood on his hands.
Denzel Washington is a force of nature in Highest 2 Lowest.
Highest 2 Lowest is, fittingly perhaps, a movie of very high highs and very low lows. The first 40 minutes of this film, in fact, may include the most baffling decisions of Spike Lee’s career. It’s a stiffly paced, visually airless first act that sets up King’s life and the kidnapping, as well as King’s moral dilemma over whether to pay the ransom for someone else’s son. On its own, the first act is not particularly terrible, but the primary reason it makes for such a tonally confusing watch is because of the overwhelmingly treacly score.
Composer Howard Drossin’s score is playing almost nonstop for that entire first act, except in the exceptionally stark scene when King first receives the phone call from the kidnappers. The issue is that Drossin’s score is so generic it could be mistaken for a temp track: it’s mismatched at best, and distracting and off-putting at worst. It’s an orchestral, classical-sounding score that feels better suited for a Lifetime movie than a tense crime thriller. It makes for an emotionally discordant viewing experience, and one that pitches the film over into parody (at one point, King is discussing a business deal, and the score inexplicably swells into a classical romantic overture).
It leads to the actors actively fighting with the score — a situation that works out fine for veterans like Washington and Wright, both of whom relish in playing to the back of the theater, but results in most of the supporting cast getting drowned out by the music. A wooden Ilfenesh Hadera, who admittedly isn’t given much to do apart from “supportive wife,” suffers the most from this, while the group of police detectives assigned to the case feel so flattened by the overwhelming score they come off as bumbling. In fact, most of the characters, even Washington’s swaggering David King, feel so awkward and barely human in these first 40 minutes that you wonder if it’s intentional on Lee’s part — a bid at Brechtian storytelling that emphasizes the cavernous gap between the uber-rich and the rest of us.
Wright’s casting as the father of the boy who accidentally gets kidnapped is the most inspired part of Lee’s remake.
But when the film leaves King’s apartment and gets lost in the chaotic throng of New York, the movie comes alive. The static dialogue scenes and sweeping drone shots are replaced by vibrant, active camerawork that feels like the evolutionary next step in Lee’s filmmaking. It’s like Lee himself feels suffocated by the glass houses and skyscrapers of the first act, and only gets to unleash himself — in all his wild, ebullient energy — once he gets back on the streets. Though, technically, it’s the subway that really forms the electric backbone of this film: All of the film’s most inspired sequences, including the first trade of the ransom money, take place on the New York subway. The first subway sequence, which plays out like a thrilling heist, suddenly turns Highest 2 Lowest into a caper movie — Lee staging the sequence during a Puerto Rican pride parade, with the kidnappers duping King and the police just as a spontaneous street concert reaches its exhilarating climax. It makes you wonder why Lee didn’t diegetically incorporate the music of New York, and later, the music from King’s potential new discoveries, into the film rather than that horrifically distracting score from the beginning.
From then on, Highest 2 Lowest is firing on all cylinders, propelling itself forward with the kind of kinetic energy that its first sluggish act couldn’t have even dreamed of. The discovery of the culprit (a surprisingly decent A$AP Rocky) feels like a particularly inspired change from the original film on Lee’s part, with Washington’s King and Wright’s Christopher boldly taking things into their own hands when the police prove ineffectual. Giving Washington a few action beats is a no-brainer — he’s Denzel Washington, after all — and it’s clear that Washington is chomping at the bit to go big, which he does with Shakespearean aplomb. But casting Wright in a part that was mostly pushed to the background in Kurosawa’s version proved to be the real stroke of genius on Lee’s part: Wright naturally brings a gravitas and depth to the character, not to mention a cheeky edge, that had never been provided before.
Cheeky might be the magic word to describe Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, a film of two parts — one that feels a bit like a joke, and the other that is so cool and propulsive it immediately makes you forget you were ever laughing. It’s an odd film at worst, a daring late-career experiment from a master at best. But it’s greatest when it’s both.
