There’s enormous risk in remaking a movie like “High and Low.” Japanese master Akira Kurosawa set the bar high with his 1963 take on a kidnapping that brings an ambitious businessman to his knees — which means, even in the hands of such a visionary director as Spike Lee, you can’t help worrying how low a modern, New York-set update might go.
For three-quarters of its running time, Lee’s “Highest 2 Lowest” glides along far better than skeptics might have expected (it’s night and day with his sordid U.S. adaptation of “Old Boy”). And then comes a scene for which there is no equivalent in Kurosawa’s version — a face-off between Denzel Washington and A$AP Rocky as the man with the nerve to ransom his son — and the movie rockets into a sublime new stratosphere, delivering an electrifying last act that’s at once original and deeply personal.
In the end, Lee has taken “High and Low” to new highs, delivering a soul-searching genre movie that entertains while also sounding the alarm about where the culture could be headed. Ultimately destined to stream on Apple TV+, the big-screen-worthy project should perform well when A24 releases it in theaters on Aug. 22, three months after premiering out of competition at Cannes.
As the film opens, blaring “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” over beauty shots of the Big Apple (treating the “Oklahoma!” hit as a New York-signifying show tune), hip-hop mogul David King is on top of the world. From the balcony of his penthouse apartment — in Brooklyn’s awe-inspiring Olympia Dumbo building, no less — Washington’s character is poised to acquire a majority stake in Stackin’ Hits, the record label he co-founded more than two decades earlier.
David has two things to show for all his years in the music business. There’s Stackin’ Hits, of course, but even more important is his family: wife Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera) and teenage son, Trey (Aubrey Joseph), whose ear for fresh talent just might carry the label through the turbulent challenges the industry is facing. At this moment, just as David cashed in his portfolio and took out second mortgages on his two homes — all with the intention of seizing control of the company he helped to create — he receives a call from someone who claims to have abducted Trey.
This direct threat to the King family puts his plans on pause, but it’s just the first of several twists (unchanged from the original) that force David to decide whether he’ll pay the ransom: 17.5 million Swiss francs. In a new wrinkle, public perception (as in, how the situation looks on social media) plays a significant role in his decision. No one wants to be seen as the guy who bought a company with the same fortune that could have saved an innocent teenager’s life.
The three NYPD detectives (Dean Winters, LaChanze and John Douglas Thompson) insist they’ll be able to retrieve the money, but the kidnapper is smarter than they think, insisting that David bring the loot by subway, then making it disappear amid a busy Puerto Rican Day Parade in the South Bronx. Pumped full of life by pianist Eddie Palmieri’s street performance, it’s a spectacular sequence that instantly ranks among the best New York City action set-pieces of all time, up there with the chase scene in “The French Connection” and the Five Points battle in “Gangs of New York.”
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Lee has been establishing a lot more than just exposition in the lead-up to this moment, but from here on, the movie has us by the collar, propelled by a dramatic force that reminds what a gifted filmmaker he can be when everything’s firing in the same direction. As in Kurosawa’s version (loosely adapted from the novel “King’s Ransom” by Ed McBain), a serious miscalculation by the kidnapper drags David’s oldest and closest friend, Paul (Jeffrey Wright), into the mix. Screenwriter Alan Fox strengthens the bond between these two men while also making a point about how the police officers treat them differently.
David is one of the city’s most successful Black entrepreneurs, and as such, he’s afforded special respect and cooperation. Paul, on the other hand, has a criminal record and is viewed as a suspect at first. Later, when the tables turn, the police seem far less willing to help him than they did David. But Paul’s not without his own support network, putting out calls to “the streets” that yield essential clues in the investigation.
You could hardly ask for two better actors than Washington and Wright in these roles, with the reunion between Washington and Lee (their fifth collaboration) allowing them to build on their own decades-long artistic legacies. Here, we find the “Malcolm X” star playing a man called King, while doctored portraits of a young Denzel hang all around the man’s office. Meanwhile, King’s home is a temple to Black excellence, art-directed like a Pedro Almodóvar movie (its colored walls adorned with paintings and artifacts from Lee’s personal collection), in a way that collapses the distance between the filmmaker and his fictional protagonist.
In theory, paying the ransom comes at the direct expense of David’s big plans for the music biz, and as such, it forces him to put all of his priorities into perspective. For the remake’s all-new climax, looking every bit the Equalizer (while dubbing himself “the Chance-Giver”), Washington throws down in a spontaneous rap battle with A$AP Rocky in a moment that shows why this man’s the king. As David reclaims what he loves, we can hear Lee’s own passions: as a teacher of film, speaker of truths and elder statesman to the community. They boil over in the last half-hour — in the rousing musical performance that gives the film its name and in a coda that reveals Lee’s artistic conscience, answering why he dared to touch such a sacred object as Kurosawa’s masterpiece.
For starters, New York is practically another planet, compared to 1960s Tokyo, and this project allows Lee to celebrate what the city means to him today. As David puts it, “You either build or destroy in this world.” Done wrong, remaking “High and Low” might have diminished the original, but in this case, Lee clearly has something vital to add.
From Variety US