It’s been a while since we’ve seen a Spike Lee movie as self-assured, cocky and indulgent as “Highest 2 Lowest.”
The film, a remake of a 1963 Akira Kurosawa kidnapping thriller based on a novel by Ed McBain, is long and meandering, with plot twists and pauses for lectures and pregnant plugs for features of African American culture.
A prominent record company founder’s son is kidnapped and the police rush to the family’s huge Brooklyn penthouse. Did the police issue an “Ebony Alert,” the mother wants to know? She has to explain to the cops, and the audience, what she’s talking about.
Jazz fills the soundtrack under almost every scene. Still shots of African American art and African American sports jerseys (New York Knick Earl “The Pearl” Monroe) as decor flavor its affluence.
The banter is music business quick, leaning hard into New York African American street argot.
“Is Al Green? Is Barry White? Is James Brown? Is Prince Purple?”
Lee was brought back from the directorial dead by Jordan Peele, who produced “BlackKklansman” and seemingly reined-in some of Lee’s indulgent touches. Lee burned through much of the capital that gave him with another middling military movie (he sucks at them).
But for “Highest 2 Lowest” he lured back his muse, Denzel Washington, for a tale of a wealthy man and pillar of his community whose reputation and self-image are tested by a struggling business facing a takeover and a kidnapping that threatens everything he holds dear.
Or does it?
David King is “Da King,” the founder of “Stack’n Hits” records and possessor of “The Best Ears in the Business.” But the label’s glory years were a couple of decades back, and his closest partner (Michael Potts) thinks it’s time to sell out.
His righteous but free-spending, charity-connected wife (Ilfenesh Hadera of Lee’s “Oldboy” and TV’s “Billions”) is ready for a change of focus. And his aspiring baller son Trey (Aubrey Joseph of TV’s “Clock & Dagger”) could use a little more attention.
Dad’s content to limo his son to his posh school, chat up the celebrity coach (ex-Laker Rick Fox), jab the kid about his Celtics-green headband, and head to work, hunting for that ever-more-elusive comeback hit.
His grounding/sounding board might be his driver, Paul (Jeffrey Wright, outstanding as always). He’s an ex-con that King has given the keys to his Rolls and a good life, including enrollment of Paul’s kid (Elijah Wright, Jeffrey’s son) in that school and on that basketball team.
But King’s old timer’s dream of buying back control of his company and guiding it back to the top of the music business is derailed by a single phone call. The voice is vituperative, foul-mouthed and familiar, with grievance underscoring its message.
It’s King’s “day of reckoning.” I have your son. I want $17.5 million in Swiss francs for him.
King and wife Pam are shaken. The cops (John Douglas Thompson, LaChanze and Dean Winters) are staring down the ex-con driver. But we’re allowed just enough time to wonder if this is a sham, a scam with short term and long term financial benefits for Da King.
And then Trey comes home. The kidnappers grabbed the wrong kid.
What follows might be King’s real test, whether the son of his employee and friend is worth that much money to him folded into fears of “cancel” culture consequences is he puts money over a boy’s life.
Washington gives one of his great performances as King, a man comfortable swinging between two worlds with diverging ways of thinking and even talking. He’s all business as he charms colleagues (Wendell Pierce, et al) and exchanges compliant directions with the cops before swapping F-bombs and N-bombs with the kidnapper when it comes to matters of “MY money.”
Washington lets us wonder about King’s role in all this, all the way to the end. And he makes King unblinking and blunt in heart-to-hearts with panicked Paul.
“You expect me to pay for some kidnapper’s mistake?”
Wright perfectly compliments Washington’s gravitas in the crisis scenes, and brings the down and dirty “street” to his performance when matters come to a head and the two older men decide to settle things themselves.
“Highest 2 Lowest” is never less than entertaining, but Lee often invests more in tone and messaging than plot logic. He skips narrative details as if he expects us to know Kurosawa’s film as well as the NYU Film student he once was and just go with his abridged take on it.
The shifts in the story are handled curtly, and more than a few turns in the plot are under-explained or even unexplained. The big action sequence — a money exchange on a moving subway/El train — is cliched and laughably illogical. The number of moving pieces in this bit of business is skated by. Who ARE all these possible “accomplices?”
Lee flatters himself into a drifting anti-climax of a finale, followed by a second anti-climax, both of them musical showcases as he tries to play musical kingmaker (Remember “Da’ Butt?”).
And he indulges himself in some almost hilarious inside humor. That pistol Paul’s packing?
“It’s insurance” Wright growls, the way tough guys always describe their hidden “piece.” Then he tops that with a joke about the African American star of TV commercials for insurance. “This is Jake from State Farm.”
And that second “four pound” piece? That’s “Mayhem.”
Dean Winters, who plays the most aggressive (and cluelessly white) detective here is Mr. Mayhem in those All State insurance commercials.
There’s an amusing blast of Boston bashing, and even a visual pun about the studio (A24) that made this Apple TV+ release. “Do the Right Thing” star Rosie Perez makes an appearance at New York’s Puerto Rican Day parade in the film.
Cute and cuter.
Lee isn’t the most graceful at grafting his Movie with a Message intentions onto a tale more interested in mystery, illogical action and cheap laughs.
But that’s what one means in describing “Highest 2 Lowest” as “vintage” Spike. His signature touches abound, the jokes land and the dialogue pops. And if, at 68, he’s not the cunning, streetwise tough you’d want planning your ransom exchange for you, so what? He’s not a music impressario either.
When he’s at his best, we indulge his indulgences.
Rating: R, drug use, profanity
Cast: Denzel Washington, Jeffrey Wright,
Ilfenesh Hadera, Aubrey Joseph, Elijah Wright, Dean Winters, John Douglas Thompson, LaChanze, Michael Potts, Wendell Pierce and A$AP Rocky
Credits: Directed by Spike Lee, scripted by Alan Fox, based on the Akira Kurosawa film “High and Low” which was based on a novel by Ed McBain. An Apple TV+ release.
Running time: 2:15