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20-05-2025
- Entertainment
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‘Highest 2 Lowest' Review: Spike Lee's Kurosawa-Inspired Kidnapping Drama Isn't So Much a Remake as a Manifesto
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. More from Variety 'Splitsville' Review: Dakota Johnson and Adria Arjona Play the Field in an Exhausting Knockabout Romcom 'The Crime of Father Amaro' Exec Producer Laura Imperiale Boards Dominican-Set 'Black Sheep, White Sheep' by 'Made in Bangkok' Helmer Flavio Florencio (EXCLUSIVE) Denzel Washington Gets Surprise Honorary Palme d'Or at Cannes During Spike Lee's 'Highest 2 Lowest' Premiere 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.' 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. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
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‘Highest 2 Lowest' Review: Spike Lee Returns with a Jarringly Fun and Upbeat Riff on One of Akira Kurosawa's Bleakest Films
Titled like a sequel, plotted like a remake, and shot with enough of its own singular verve to ensure that most people never think of it as either of those things, Spike Lee's deliriously entertaining — if jarringly upbeat — 'Highest 2 Lowest' modernizes the post-war anxieties of Akira Kurosawa's 'High and Low' for the age of parasocial relationships. Formerly a hyper-capitalistic shoe magnate embodied by the wolfish Toshiro Mifune, Kingo Gondo has been reborn as record executive David King (Denzel Washington, in what might be his most towering screen performance since 'Training Day'). Likewise, the glass mansion his progenitor owned atop the hills of Yokohama has been swapped out for a penthouse apartment at the Olympia building in Dumbo — soon to become a minor tourist attraction if this refreshing late summer treat is seen widely enough during the two-week theatrical run that will precede its disappearance into the annals of Apple TV+. More from IndieWire Kate Mara on Treating 'Friendship' Like a 'Dramatic' Indie and the Surprisingly 'Weird' Connection to Werner Herzog 'Renoir' Review: An 11-Year-Old Girl Ponders the Mysteries of the Universe in Chie Hayakawa's Extremely Low-Key Coming-of-Age Drama Beyond that, however, the basic chords of the song remain the same as they were back in 1963, even if Lee includes a bit more screaming directly into the camera about how much Boston's sports teams suck than I remember there being in Kurosawa's take. Once again, our protagonist is forced into a compromising position on the eve of a critical business deal when a downtrodden kidnapper mistakes his driver's son for his own kid, Trey (Aubrey Joseph). And once again, all the money in the world can't save him from paying a price for his greed. The world is a very different place than it was 60 years ago, but some things never change; when people lose hope, they still turn against the people who gave it to them. Only now, the cash-strapped kidnapper doesn't have to physically look up at the rich man's castle in order to be taunted by his fortune (although Lee makes sure to include a scene where the criminal does that anyway). In the version of the story that screenwriter William Alan Fox has reworked for 2025, the bad guy may not be able to spy his idol and nemesis from his own apartment in Forest Hills, but he feels like David is personally mocking him every time he looks at his phone. Even at a time of immense economic stratification, technology has the power to make people's dream lives seem close enough to reach out and grab for themselves, and that closeness is especially palpable for a young Black rapper (A$AP Rocky, just as good here as he is in recent Sundance highlight 'If I Had Legs I'd Kick You'), who sees so much of himself in the multi-millionaire CEO of Stackin' Hits records. He feels like they know each other already, and that the real crime is that they don't. The truth, however, is that David King — or King David, as he's been crowned by the New York media — is no longer as secure in his throne as he was during the pre-Spotify golden age of 2000s hip-hop. Pushing 70 in a young man's game, the hitmaker with 'the best ears in the business' has been on the brink of irrelevance for the last few years, and his dwindling market share has only led him further astray from his famously impeccable taste. Despite promising his wife Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera, giving beneficent Queen Macbeth) that he'd sell his empire and saunter off into the sunset, David's wounded pride inspires a desperate bid to buy out his partner and recover full ownership of the label, and he'll need every cent he's got in order to pull it off. Needless to say, the best ears in the business may not be able to save David from listening to the worst voices in his head after a kidnapper demands a $17.5 million ransom for the safe return of his chauffeur's son. Only so much can be gained from comparing Lee's movie against the much tenser and more severe Kurosawa masterpiece that inspired it (and was itself based on the Evan Hunter novel 'King's Ransom'), but the relationship between David and his driver is one of the few areas where 'Highest 2 Lowest' clearly comes out on top. If Washington owns every minute of this film, riveting as he grasps for a righteousness that his money can't seem to buy him, Jeffrey Wright's heartsick performance as David's best friend and closest employee is the friction that gives purchase to his character's inner conflict. Paul grew up with David, but life took him in another direction, and he's been living in the King's penthouse ever since he got out of jail. 'It's just fucking money!' Trey might insist, but the financial dependence at the core of his dad's universe is so obvious that all of David's conversations with Paul are silently choked with the fear of acknowledging it, but when David waffles over paying the ransom for Paul's son (a ransom he was more than ready to pay when he thought his own son had been nabbed), the unspoken truth at the center of their friendship begins to rip the two men apart. Such is the price they pay for trying to pretend — as so many people do — that money is somehow able to exist without a moral dimension. The tension between David and Paul keeps 'Highest 2 Lowest' upright even when the movie around it threatens to go slack. Lee doesn't share Kurosawa's patience for long, talky, single-location sequences, and his attempts at Ice Spicing up this relatively low-event movie can be more trouble than they're worth, even if Ice Spice herself is acquitted on all charges for her two seconds of screen time. Hard cuts, double takes, and strange cameos are par for the course with Spike, but those affectations tend to distract from the primacy of this film's performances. Elsewhere, and everywhere, Howard Drossin's wildly intrusive orchestral score smothers every moment in a wall of sound that burrows into your head like hold music and refuses to discriminate between moods. That garishness also seeps into Matthew Libatique's digital cinematography, but there it works to the advantage of this movie's heated sense of panic (not 'Do the Right Thing' or 'Summer of Sam' hot, but sweltering enough to feel David lose his cool). Then again, there isn't exactly a lot to see. While it would be absurd to suggest that Lee's reimagination doesn't have its own vivid sense of place (a famous sequence, now set aboard the 6 train as it travels from Borough Hall to the Bronx, flattens New York City into a unified socioeconomic class of Yankees fans), the film's general disinterest in replicating the verticality of Kurosawa's version takes away from a third act plunge into the kidnapper's environment. But Lee is so much more interesting for what he brings to a project than for what he takes away from it, and 'Highest 2 Lowest' is naturally at its best when it deviates from its source material. The film's wholehearted embrace of Black culture is baked into David's desire to protect Stackin' Hits from buyers who might dilute the brand of its history, but it's also suffused into the various changes that Lee's version makes to the story's third act, which pivots away from the darkness of Japan's post-war heroin epidemic and towards the aspirational aspects of hip-hop. No spoilers, but at a certain point in the movie Denzel Washington is forced to rap for his life. It shouldn't work, and it definitely almost doesn't, but director and star alike commit to the bit with the same intensity that they've always committed to each other, and somehow they make it sing. That's one of several risks Lee takes in service of making 'Highest 2 Lowest' significantly more fun and hopeful than any iteration of this story has ever been before — risks which are all in the service of showcasing, to quote the press notes, 'the transcendent power of music and the loving bonds of a close-knit African American family.' If this story of economic despair and its malcontents doesn't seem like it was ever intended to be a vehicle for those messages, Lee doesn't seem to have gotten the memo, as he eschews the morally ambiguous despair of Kurosawa's ending in favor of a kumbaya for the richest family in town. King David may not be the same bottom-line obsessed despot at the end of this film that he was at the start, and it's hard to swallow the last scene's glib conclusion that a little humility is enough to make everything right. And so Lee's reinterpretation strains to leave us on a high instead of a low, as befits the finale of an update so compellingly eager to flip the script on one of Kurosawa's most cynical films. It is just fucking money, at the end of the day. But then again, what isn't? 'Highest 2 Lowest' premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. A24 will release it in theaters on Friday, August 22, and it will be available to stream on Apple TV starting Friday, September 5. Want to stay up to date on IndieWire's film and critical thoughts? to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers. 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