‘Highest 2 Lowest’ Review: Spike Lee Adapts a Masterpiece
Spike Lee’s adapts Akira Kurosawa’s original with ’Highest 2 Lowest’ - undoubtedly the best remake of Lee’s career, anchored by another magnifying lead turn from Denzel Washington, who continues to prove why he’s the greatest to have ever done it.
It took three tries for Spike Lee to finally churn out a good remake, and one where the bar to cross was perhaps more impossible than Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy and Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess. That’s why the first forty minutes of his latest motion picture, Highest 2 Lowest, are one of the weakest of his career. For some inexplicable reason, Lee tries to stay incredibly close to the original source material, Evan Hunter (Ed McBain)’s Kings Ransom, which was adapted into film in 1963 by Akira Kurosawa with High and Low, and fails to infuse his own voice into this thrilling story. That’s what sank his previous remakes, which had admirable intentions, but never felt like Spike Lee joints, with his personal imprint and recognizable style.
The thing is, you can’t surpass Kurosawa’s High and Low, whether you want to or not. That movie will forever stand the test of time as one of the greatest ever made, both a masterclass in visual storytelling and screenwriting. One can watch the entire thing on mute and understand exactly what Kurosawa is doing, while the efficient script is as thrilling to hear on its own. His sense of image-making is frequently jaw-dropping, even during its opening 55 minutes, where he stays within the confines of Kingo Gondo’s (Toshiro Mifune) apartment as he contemplates whether or not he should pay the ransom to free his chauffeur’s son, who has mistakenly been abducted.
When Kurosawa eventually gets out of the house and into a moving train, he stages the best setpiece of his career, one that still has me clenched on the edge of my seat even after rewatching the masterpiece on multiple occasions. Ran is probably his most visually staggering work of art, but High and Low still stands as his greatest-ever achievement, narratively and visually (though one can pick any movie from his filmography, say it’s his best, and be correct).
That’s why it feels so baffling that Lee would ever want to attempt to follow in his footsteps when introducing audiences to David King (Denzel Washington) and the high-stakes world of music producing, before he receives a call that his son, Trey (Aubrey Joseph), has been kidnapped. Of course, astute viewers who have seen High and Low know that the kidnapper, an aspiring rapper named Yung Felon (A$AP Rocky), made a mistake and kidnapped the chauffeur, Paul’s (Jeffrey Wright) son, Kyle (Elijah Wright), instead. And in that entire section, the whole thing feels like it’s Lee on autopilot: Matthew Libatique’s photography is flat and unengaging, the editing from Barry Alexander Brown and Allyson C. Johnson has no sense of rhythm or pace, and, worst of all, Howard Drossin’s musical score is genuinely abysmal.
The only saving graces in this section are Denzel and Jeffrey Wright, who give their all and understand that their characters’ pain stems from the fear that the worst has happened to their sons. But the music, Jesus Christ, the music, is so terrible, overbearing, and has no business being this loud and bludgeoning, that it almost sinks this entire first half to nearly unwatchable territory.
It feels unfair to compare Lee’s movie and Kurosawa’s masterpiece, because they’re not cut from the same aesthetic and thematic cloth, but the latter understood when to utilize music and when to tone it down. In the remake, the scene where King receives the call that his son has been abducted employs silence for the first few seconds, where the audience is primed to sit with the character, as we don’t hear the exchange between Washington’s protagonist and A$AP Rocky. In that regard, it creates a disquieting sense of anxiety even before we hear the bad news.
Yet, for some unknown reason, the loud drums of Drossin’s orchestral music jump out at us in full effect when David reenters his apartment and announces to his wife, Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera, incredible in this), that Tyler has been abducted. It makes no sense and actively hampers some of the more significant dramatic beats of that opening section, where we’re supposed to ruminate with the protagonist as he decides what the right thing is to do when he realizes that Tyler is safe and sound, but Kyle has been kidnapped. And it’s not because he made a mistake that Yung Felon will stop trying to get 17.5 million Swiss francs out of King’s own pocket, which the producer recently spent a lot of money to reacquire his own record company.
He was willing to pay it all to get Tyler back, but what about Kyle? This was the central moral dilemma at the heart of High and Low’s huis clos section, before getting out of the apartment, which Lee sadly abandons when reinterpreting Kurosawa’s classic to get to a different second part that feels more in line with his filmmaking sensibilities than attempting to recreate one of the greatest movies ever made. It’s actually at that point, when Detective Earl Bridges (John Douglas Thompson), explains to David what he must do after agreeing to pay the ransom to Yung Felon, that Highest 2 Lowest begins to come out of its “let's recreate Kurosawa's High and Low even know it's impossible even to touch an iota of his genius” shell and starts to adapt its storytelling as a real Spike Lee joint.
The terrible music suddenly becomes rhythmically engaging, Matthew Libatique’s photography is less static and artificial, and morphs into a more dynamic, almost experimental approach, as it constantly shifts between digital and celluloid photography, while the editing also tightens itself up and begins to find its own groove. What follows next is a series of bravura sequences that rank among Lee's finest setpieces, elevating Highest 2 Lowest from a potentially disappointing remake to a compelling and often staggering motion picture.
Lee finally understands that he can’t top Kurosawa, especially when getting to the train sequence, and instead stages something else entirely, while retaining the bare bones of Kurosawa’s story intact. He still manages to craft a setpiece of pure cinema, one that celebrates the spirit and life that imbues New York’s Puerto Rican community, where Drossin’s music suddenly responds to the live performance from the late Eddie Palmieri, which punctuates the rapid pacing (and chaos) of the ransom drop. We see the intricacies of the kidnapper’s plot firsthand, just like we finally see how Spike has resurrected himself from the confines of the remake to finally find his voice again as an artist.
It’s always been there – he just needed a little push for the story to feel decidedly his own. It’s especially apparent when he doesn’t do what Kurosawa did in High and Low after the train sequence, which focuses on the police’s methods to find the kidnapper. Mifune’s character takes a backseat, and we only see him on a few occasions, rather than him being the star of the show. Instead of following the same beats, Lee shifts the story back to David, so he can have the opportunity to catch Yung Felon himself and perhaps have a heart-to-heart with him.
This shift is much needed for a movie that seemingly wanted to stay as close as possible to one of Lee’s biggest influences, and it also allows Denzel to remind us all why he’s the world’s greatest living actor. No one commands a scene like him, and no one can modulate emotional registers the way he does, especially in an exchange where he confronts the person who decided to play with his family – and way of life – that he built himself to attain the success he now has. The sequence serves as a showcase for Washington to lay it all out, freestyle, and express what he needs to say to Felon and the audience, while also allowing A$AP Rocky to demonstrate his potential for a future in the industry.
While his presence may not be as significant in the runtime as, say, Jeffrey Wright, A$AP’s portrayal of Yung Felon is one of the year’s best supporting performances, from the sheer impact he carries with two poignant (and visually jaw-dropping, from Libatique’s use of extreme close-ups to a unique employment of ultra-wide split-screen) exchanges that finally digs deep into the heart of the movie’s messaging and social critique. It’s one of Lee’s most politically cogent cri-de-coeurs, and could be the reason why he wanted to reimagine Kurosawa’s movie in the first place.
The conclusion does sag a bit, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter. Lee said what he had to say. He’s allowed to overindulge a bit, especially after a rough opening section that made us wonder whether or not his heart is still in the game, or if he’s just tired of making movies, considering how anti-art this generation is heading towards AI-generated junk (a comment he frequently makes in the film itself). By the end of Highest 2 Lowest, you’ll not only think that Lee’s heart is very much in the game, but that he’s still got it, and won’t stop making art that will transcend his – and our – time, especially with this much passionate hatred towards Boston sports teams inserted on every occasion he has in this film. If that doesn’t prove to you that he’s still got it, what will?