★★★ (3 out of 4)
Can’t wait! That was my first reaction when I heard that Spike Lee and Denzel Washington would be collaborating for the fifth time on “Highest 2 Lowest,” a reimagining of the classic 1963 kidnap drama “High and Low,” directed by Japanese master Akira Kurosawa. In theaters in advance of an Apple TV+ streaming debut on Sept. 5, the reboot isn’t perfect. Thrillingly alive is more like it. But no cinema addict worthy of the name would dream of missing it.
Kurosawa has been Americanized before, notably when his “Seven Samurai” went Hollywood as the western hit “The Magnificent Seven.” A 2016 remake starred Washington in the role originated by Kurosawa’s favorite leading man Toshiro Mifune. In an echo of the Kurosawa-Mifune team, Lee stars his friend Washington in the key role of a businessman in a moral crisis.
Mifune’s character, Kingo Gondo, is now Washington’s David King, a multi-Grammy-winning music industry mogul said to have “the best ears in the business.” But good ears don’t help King when his teen son, Trey (Aubrey Joseph), is kidnapped with a $17.5 million ransom laid on his head by extortionists who aren’t kidding around.
With his business flailing— King is losing his majority stake in his company Stackin’ Hits—he must leverage the fortune, including his sleek Manhattan office and Dumbo penthouse that he and wife Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera) spent years acquiring.
A twist in the Alan Fox script, loosely based on the 1959 Evan Hunter novel “King’s Ransom,” comes when it turns out that Trey hasn’t been kidnapped. The victim is Kyle (Elijah Wright), the son of King’s driver and right-hand man, Paul (the excellent Jeffrey Wright, Elijah’s real-life dad).
A team of detectives —led by Earl Bridges (John Douglas Thompson), Bell (LaChanze) and Higgins (Dean Winters)—commandeer King’s living room to do a job King quickly co-opts as his own. The kidnapper demands a $17.5 million ransom, or Trey will die.
Will King do the right thing and sacrifice all for a chauffeur’s son? Not without an angle, of course. Kurosawa used the theme to eviscerate the class system. Lee does the same with those extra details that make this a Spike Lee joint. “The first half of “Highest 2 Lowest” is loaded with talk-talk-talk on a moral dilemma that is provocative despite being murder on momentum. Though it’s heresy to say it, Kurosawa’s film suffered a similar lapse.
No cinema addict worthy of the name would dream of missing ['Highest 2 Lowest']...'Spike builds this high-voltage thriller with a social conscience and he’s built it to sting.
But then the movie plugs in a livewire in the person of A$AP Rocky, real name Rakim Mayers. He’s playing a rising rapper known as Yung Felon who has a tense, complicated relationship with King. Mayers, who’s acted well before, rises to the level of pure dynamite, holding his own in the company of the great Washington who has no rival as a commanding screen presence.
These big-ticket suspense blowouts are electrifying. Spike’s got game and shows it in the ransom scenes that intersect the Puerto Rican Day parade with a crowd of Yankee fans and King racing to a ticking-clock rescue in the subway. This sequence belongs in the Spike Lee time capsule, along with the camera wizardry of cinematographer Matthew Libatique who kicks off the film with a breathtaking visual love letter to Manhattan and Brooklyn set to ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ and finishes with flourish...well, just wait and see. Spike builds this high-voltage thriller with a social conscience and he’s built it to sting.