In choosing to adapt Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, Spike Lee set the bar for himself formidably high. That 1963 thriller is one of the Japanese auteur’s finest, a study in stark social contrasts that unfolds in two discrete acts: the first a tense chamber drama set in the hilltop home of a wealthy manufacturer, the second a sprawling procedural manhunt that descends from that lofty perch into the sordid criminal underworld of Yokohama. High and Low strikes a perfect balance between style (especially noteworthy are Kurosawa’s use of deep focus and elegantly choreographed long takes) and substance. Cinematic bravura aside, the movie’s story, adapted from a 1959 novel by Ed McBain, is riveting: Even as you marvel at the composition of nearly every shot, you’re breathlessly caught up in the suspense, and in the moral and ultimately philosophical questions that confront both hero and villain. At the center of it all is a titanic movie-star performance from Toshiro Mifune as an overleveraged shoe tycoon caught up in a kidnapping plot.
A title card near the end of the closing credits of Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest notes that the film was “inspired by the master, Akira Kurosawa,” and the movie’s very existence is an admiring homage to an auteur Lee has cited as a favorite. But this adaptation is at its best when it least resembles the original, and the director seems to know it. Highest 2 Lowest picks up energy and urgency when it spends time with its conflicted hero, whose uncertainty about his legacy resonates with questions both Lee and star Denzel Washington must be asking themselves at this point in their careers. The 68-year-old Lee and the 70-year-old Washington have been working together since the 1990s, when they made such well-regarded movies as Malcolm X; a portrait of a cultural legend in winter is exactly the movie the two should be making together three decades later.
But when Highest 2 Lowest shifts gears between that close-up character study and the grand-scale crime thriller it also sets out to be, the transition doesn’t always go smoothly. Though it’s eight minutes shorter than the original, Lee’s version seems at least 20 minutes longer. Still, this busy, lavishly shot update of Kurosawa’s austerely simple thriller makes Lee’s signature shagginess feel intentional. Highest 2 Lowest moves with a swagger and self-confidence that perhaps oversells what the script actually has to offer, but it’s hard to resist the draw of seeing Lee and Washington collaborate for the first time since Inside Man in 2006.
In the screenplay, by Alan Fox, Mifune’s memorably named character Kingo Gondo has become David King (Washington), who made his fortune not in footwear but in ear candy. His record label, Stackin’ Hits, is legendary in the music business for finding new artists who go on to dominate the charts and the Grammys; it’s an old-school shop that believes in taking time to develop talent and remains wary of the changes digital technology has brought to the industry. A larger and more impersonal conglomerate is on the brink of buying out Stackin’ Hits, but at the last minute before the deal is done, David decides to risk all his assets to wrest back control of the company he’s built.
That same day, David gets a phone call at his swanky high-rise overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge: His teenage son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) has been kidnapped. Soon after, with cops listening in, David agrees to pay the $17.5 million ransom—but then it comes to light that the wrong kid has been napped. David’s godson Kyle (Elijah Wright), son of the mogul’s longtime friend and personal driver Paul (Jeffrey Wright, the young actor’s real-life father), is the one who’s being held at an unknown location until David hands over his entire fortune. That the decision causes even a moment’s hesitation is understandably a source of friction between Paul and David, but the latter soon agrees to pay, and a plan is put in place to deliver the cash via an uptown subway train, according to the kidnapper’s highly specific instructions.
The subway chase is intercut with footage of a live show by the late Eddie Palmieri at the Puerto Rican Day Parade, tearing it up on the piano while hundreds of fans dance in the street. It’s a pleasure to watch Palmieri in one of his last filmed performances, and Lee’s camera (wielded by the great cinematographer Matthew Libatique) is never more confident than when it pulls out to provide sweeping wide-screen views of the city he loves. But the logical and spatial connection between the spectacle of the parade and the simultaneous unfolding of the action on the train is tenuous, and the parallel editing of this sequence never quite achieves the grand “Only in New York” sense of fusion Lee seems to be aiming for.
There are moments when Lee’s crazy-quilt style, his long-standing tendency to throw in everything but the kitchen sink when it comes to filmmaking techniques, serves the movie well. This applies to the wittily chosen needle drops of pop music from all eras and genres: An opening montage of shots of the Brooklyn Bridge and New York Harbor set to “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ ” from Oklahoma! is thrilling, and when Washington’s character asks Wright’s to choose a psych-up song to play on their drive to a tense meeting, there’s something endearing about these two old-timers cranking up the 1979 disco classic “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now.” But for a movie about a producer with “the best ears in the business,” the score by Howard Drossin is bizarrely distracting and dated. A tender marital moment between David and his wife appears, from the background music, to be taking place in a hotel elevator in the mid-1980s.
There are also some jarring moments in the dialogue, as if the screenplay were glitching. As David’s wife Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera, given little to do but stand around looking worried yet supportive in glamorous outfits) sets the police team up in the Kings’ apartment, she is oddly specific about where they should put the displaced objects on the dining table. (The vase goes to the left of the fireplace. Why? Chekhov’s gun be damned: We never learn.) And while some of the Easter eggs Lee embeds in the movie are fun—the coach of the youth basketball team Trey and Kyle play on is amusingly played by former L.A. Laker and Boston Celtic Rick Fox—others feel distractingly self-indulgent, as when an especially rabid Yankees fan (played by Nicholas Turturro, John’s younger brother) breaks the fourth wall to deliver his (and Lee’s) emphatically negative opinion of the Boston Red Sox directly to the camera.
Like High and Low, Highest 2 Lowest ends (or, in the case of the latter, comes within one scene of ending) on a one-on-one confrontation between hero and villain. I won’t go into detail so as not to spoil the sequence of events by which David solves the mystery of the kidnapper’s identity, but when he finally appears, the bad guy is played by the rapper ASAP Rocky, who’s acted before on the big screen, but who, after this brief but powerful pair of scenes, seems poised for a major breakthrough. The first scene in which he and Washington face off is half generational confrontation, half rap battle; it’s a duel between two different styles of charismatic Black masculinity, with Washington’s genial-but-prickly patriarch clashing with Rocky’s damaged, abrasive young man from the hood. Once again here, the screenwriting falls short of what the performers have to offer: The ideological differences at stake in the men’s face-off, having to do with traditional methods of music-industry starmaking versus the rise of digital platforms, social media, and YouTube streaming, are too baldly stated to sound like the way real people speak. But the electricity that flows between Washington and Rocky is crackling.
Highest 2 Lowest may not represent Lee’s work at its finest, but it’s worth seeing on the big screen for its ambitious visuals and for its canny casting—not only of Washington and Rocky, but of Jeffrey Wright, who quietly steals every scene he’s in as the widowed father of the kidnapped boy, an ex-con and devout Muslim who bristles at the racist questioning of a white cop on the case. Bronx-based rapper Ice Spice also shows up for one memorable scene, as do Rosie Perez, Anthony Ramos, and Wendell Pierce. But this film’s most fascinating element, which remains frustratingly underexplored, is the autobiographical nature of its central character: a venerable tastemaker contemplating the meaning of his life’s work as the industry he changed for the better changes around him in ways he neither approves of nor fully understands. The movie’s central question, never quite answered with the complexity it deserves, is whether Washington’s aging titan still has the same passion for the art form that he did as a younger man. Like Lee, David King may not be stackin’ hits at the rate he once did, but he’s far from finished.