Highest 2 Lowest

dir: Spike Lee

2025

I do admit I still get excited when I hear that there’s a new Spike Lee movie coming out.

Yes, it’s because I’m a slave to the past. He made some great films back in the day. Genuinely great flicks. Do the Right Thing. Malcolm X. Mo’ Better Blues. Inside Man. 25th Hour. Some other ones, surely…

As a legacy Great One, does that mean his new flicks warrant attention/distraction/adulation? Of course! For me, at least.

And that it’s a remake of an Akira Kurosawa flick, well, that’s two good reasons. The presence, the dominance of Denzel? Three strikes, I’m in!

I have actually seen the original, High and Low a few times, and thought it was an amazing flick, mostly because I had forced myself initially to watch it because I couldn’t believe that Kurosawa made other films that weren’t about samurai lopping off each other’s limbs and heads with their shiny swords. That he made other flicks about doctors with syphilis or cops who’d lost their guns or the poorest of the poor sleeping around and eking out their miserable existences amazed me (at the time, late 90s), because I thought surely if you could make flicks with guys running around with swords, you’d just do that all the time.

But Kurosawa drew inspiration from lots of sources, almost always from outside of Japan, and liked doing way more than just period pieces. In High and Low he managed to make a taut little thriller half of which seemed to be filmed in one room, in one house, high up on a hill, and was the better for it.

There’s only one flaw in a flick that otherwise would be a masterpiece, and that’s the very ending, which has the antagonist turn into an incoherently screaming lunatic, just to reassure 1950s Japanese audiences that criminals like this were rare and utterly bonkers, so, nothing to worry about here, move along, citizen.

Transposed to modern day New York, a city Spike Lee seems to have some affinity for, the idea is the same; the presentation is very different.

Similarly, the protagonists of both films are titans of industry, but where Toshiro Mifune’s Kingo Gondo manufactured shoes, and got in trouble with other industry types because he wanted to make decent quality shoes (not made of cardboard) for women, Denzel’s David King runs or used to run a successful record label. Similarly he thinks, at one point, that his son has been kidnapped, but eventually it’s revealed that it’s his driver’s son that’s been taken instead.

The difference here is that he has a closer relationship/bond with his driver, which you would hope, since he’s played by the great Jeffrey Wright, and presumably with the son.

The great twist of the original premise is: okay, when you’re rich as shit, and your (only) son gets kidnapped, you’re going to pony up the cash, because what else could you do. But if you find out it’s actually your driver’s son, can you go “meh?” and shrug your shoulders and go on with your life instead?

In the original flick, Kingo Gondo is so noble, so painfully decent that it’s hardly a question: of course he wouldn’t want harm to come to a servant’s child. This updated, shinier, more American version? King is like, well, what’s the worst that could happen? If the kid dies, well, it will just be swamped by all the other stupid things happening in reality or in the media or especially on social media. There’s so much bullshit every day that this will eventually be forgotten, and everyone (except the kid’s father) could presumably go on with their miserable lives.

Does it make him a shitty person? Probably not. Our own children are priceless: when we have to put a dollar value on other people’s kids, well, let’s just say that most people turn into the shittiest accountants in such circumstances. Whether it’s a corporate lawyer arguing about what the dollar value of a child’s injuries based on something terrible their company did to them directly or negligently, or a medical insurance company choosing whether a particular child deserves to get lifesaving surgery or not, it’s all a different calculation when it’s yours and when it’s not (if you like them, I guess; if you don’t then I guess they’re as worthless as any of the other 8 billion people on the planet that aren’t you).

Appeals to King’s better feelings, empathy etc don’t wash. It’s when his own son (Aubrey Joseph) explains to him that letting the kid die would doom King’s empire on social media and his own academic future since they will always be tainted with having let the kid die. They will be eternal villains, accomplices, shitbags in the eyes of the world. Pride, you see, that’s the way to motivate titans of industry. It also leads to maybe the best / most uncomfortable scene in the whole film.

The flick was never going to have surprises for me, at least that’s what I told myself, but there’s always something Spike throws in that you’d never expect, and the way he transforms the ransom handover into another “love letter” to New York, situating the scene not only on a subway train but on a train that goes from Brooklyn to Yankee Stadium, when a Yankees game is about to start, during, I kid you not, a Puerto Rico Day parade, is either brilliant or just way too much.

Puerto Rico Day in New York has become what the Mardi Gras in New Orleans is in terms of cinema: something that seems to happen 365 days a year to give protagonists/antagonists an obstacle to traverse if something happens outside on the streets of New York, despite the fact it only happens once a year on the second Sunday of June.

In the context of this flick the ‘brilliant’ kidnapper and his network of scooter drivers depend on the parade and the crowds for the game to hinder the police and therefore help the crims, but honestly, I laughed when they caught one of the people who hands off the backpack full of money to someone similarly clad on a scooter, and there’s nothing in his backpack other than tampons.

I laughed not because of the tampons, because I’m not 15, nor because the cops were ‘tricked’ by this transparent ruse, but I did laugh because I thought “I bet you they never mention the guy they arrested ever again, since that would be an easy way for them to identify the actual crim in charge”, and they never did. Such a detail doesn’t matter when you’re a cinematic master and when Denzel is on set, no siree bob.

I think, ultimately, for most people (who might be tempted to watch this on Apple TV+, or the 4 people not related to Spike Lee who saw this in the cinema), they’re not going to care that it’s a remake of a Kurosawa flick, nor that Spike Lee directed it. Denzel is the drawcard. And is he worth it, to see him play a rap mogul, a lion in winter, an older man wondering whether he should go out quietly or whether he should complain loudly at some clouds and show the young’uns a thing or two?

Denzel is… Denzel. No-one’s going to confuse this with any of his greatest performances, and a lot of what he does now, after such a long and storied (and occasionally awarded) career, is coasting on the fact that he’s Denzel. There’s a lot of stuff you see him do which you know wasn’t in any script. Not just some verbal interplay or asides, but stuff you know came to him in the moment or which Spike Lee didn’t have the balls to tell him not to do. Who on this planet tells Denzel what to do, on or off screen? He is a titan, not just of industry, but of all time. He doesn’t play this mogul character like he’s Suge Knight or Dr Dre, Irv Gotti or Russell Simmons: he plays it like what if Denzel was a music mogul, but one who longed for the golden days of Stax Records, of Motown, of a halcyon time that will never, ever come again, not with the internets and streaming and such?

And he never relents, and nothing in the story indicates whether he could ever succeed again, ‘like in the old days’. His peak was twenty years ago, but he’s not going to stop being the King. David King, that is.

And how is Denzel in this? He’s great! He’s getting old! He has moments that are embarrassing. He has moments that are jaw-dropping, that make you think “no-one would have played that scene like that other than Denzel”. He’s unconvincing, and then utterly convincing, sometimes within the same scene. He’s a bully and a seducer and a man trading on faded glories and a sensitive soul and a regretful father and a jerk and a trickster, and he’s too old for this shit and yet still convincing whipping a young(er) jerk’s arse.

Sure, he equalised many jerks in them Equalizer movies, but damn wasn’t this way more satisfying when he’s kicking A$AP Rocky in the head.

If the flick has flaws, well, let’s just say the chap playing the kidnapper is perhaps not the greatest or most convincing choice in the world. It makes perfect sense, in that A$AP Rocky is a successful rapper playing an unsuccessful rapper who envies and resents David King’s success, but as an actor, he makes an unconvincing rapper, or vice versa? I don’t know how he convinced Rihanna to have his children, but he must be doing something right well away from the stage (something not apparent or even hinted at on screen during any second of this film).

Sorry, that was a mean-spirited comment, not fair. I should probably delete it. I won’t though, because yeesh. Instead of being insane, he’s just really, really dumb, and does so many dumb things that when he started yelling at The King that he should (now) put him on his roster and release his albums, I was thinking “are you so far gone that you don’t realise everyone with a gun in New York will now come after him in order to get a record deal, if he signs you?”

It doesn’t ruin the flick. There’s lazy, flabby bits to the flick, some indulgences, and how you deal with them or absorb them depends on how much slack you’re willing to cut Denzel and more so Spike. I was in a tolerant mood when I watched this, so maybe I rolled my eyes a few too many times to give myself a bit of a headache, but I still mostly enjoyed the flick. It’s nowhere near a masterpiece, but that bar is too high.

I settle for “okay” a lot of the time.

7 times why are all the trophy women in this so pale out of 10?

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“David King: My father, the man with the best ears in the business, but the coldest heart.” - Highest 2 Lowest