It’s never a good sign when you’re not sure if a film is supposed to be funny. There are moments in Spike Lee’s new take on the classic Akira Kurosawa 1963 crime drama High and Low (which itself was based on Ed McBain’s novel King’s Ransom) where I felt genuinely baffled as to whether I was watching a moment of Police Squad! parody or a fumbled episode of Law & Order. The results are sporadically entertaining, sometimes riveting, sometimes dull and sometimes just plain silly.
Denzel Washington plays a king of New York: David King, the founder and executive of a record company which is in the process of a hostile takeover when he decides to throw his entire fortune into securing a controlling share. At which point, his son Kyle gets kidnapped and he is asked for $17.5 million, a sum that would wipe him out. When the cops show up to help out, King gets impatient at their apparent lackadaisical approach: ‘Haven’t you watched SVU?’ he asks.
Rather than heighten the stakes, the twists only seem to lower them
The twists and turns that follow only seem to lower the stakes, rather than heighten them. Spike Lee throws in all his enthusiasms: Brooklyn gets A-to-Z namechecked, along with his baseball and basketball teams and rivalries. King’s job allows him to riff on music. He consults the portraits of musical icons on his office wall for advice: ‘What would you do, Jimi? What would you do, Aretha?’ Luckily, he hadn’t signed Diddy.
There are also a bunch of strange directorial choices here. We’ll see a handshake or a kiss twice, editing repetitions that presumably reference the ‘2’ in the title (which by the way, makes the film sound like a sequel). Sometimes scene changes have an animation of the company’s record logo; sometimes they don’t. Lee’s creative team isn’t blameless in the film’s raggedy feel: long-time composer Howard Drossin’s soundtrack is interminable and spends a lot of time sounding like an Irish jig. Cinematographer Matthew Libatique, meanwhile, shoots New York lovingly, but also drops in what can only be described as a Super 8 filter when indicating memories which took place way back in 2019.
Threads of the story are left dangling and ambiguities which could have been richly explored about wealth and inequality are shied away from, one suspects, in service of Denzel’s unblemished heroic status. The subtext of the film is about how legends of black culture – Denzel and Spike among them – struggle to maintain their legacy in the face of ageing and a changing world. Watching his face-off with a kidnapper played by A$AP Rocky devolve into a literal rap battle is bonkers and fun. It’s a scene from the best of the six or so movies that Spike Lee seems to be cramming into this one.
Lee has made stunningly good crime thrillers – Clockers and 25th Hour – but like his protagonist, here he appears to be struggling to stay relevant and still use his own unique voice.
Highest 2 Lowest premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.