Spike Lee's latest joint is a tribute to both the Japanese master filmmaker Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) and to Lee's frequent collaborator Denzel Washington; they've done five movies together.
Highest 2 Lowest is a reworking of Kurosawa's 1963 crime story High and Low, in which a high-powered business executive's plans to buy control of his company are disrupted when the son of his driver is mistakenly kidnapped by extortionists hoping to ransom the executive's son.
Lee moves the story to his beloved New York -- the stunning opening cityscape is cleverly and ironically set against the background of Norm Lewis's Oh, What a Beautiful Morning! from Oklahoma. Washington plays a legendary music impresario and producer named David King (Lee has a way with on-the-nose character names) sitting on top of the world in his high-rise penthouse, with his impossibly glamorous wife, Pam, played by Ilfenesh Hadera, and their dutiful 17-year-old son, Trey (Aubrey Joseph). King's trusted companion is his driver Paul (an always-welcome Jeffrey Wright), whose son Kyle (Wright's son Elijah) is the younger King's doppelganger and best friend.
King has borrowed heavily to counter an offer to purchase his recording empire, Stacking Hits, from an aggressive across-the-river competitor and is ready to make the announcement to his board when he receives a call that his son has been kidnapped and the ransom is $17.5 million in Swiss currency.
King decides to redirect the money he's gathered for the purchase to the ransom, but when the police discover the kidnappers have the wrong boy, he finds himself on the horns of a dilemma. Pay the ransom and lose his business or buy the business and condemn the boy to death.
Nearly all of the film's emotional tension comes in the exchanges between King and Paul, which reveals the rich social layering Alan Fox's screenplay builds into a story that in other places suffers from troubling narrative holes, continuity glitches and lapses in logic.
As a Spike Lee production, music factors heavily into building characters and spaces, and Lee has never been afraid to devote running time to sound and color. This picture includes a wonderful performance by Eddie Palmieri and the Salsa Orchestra, an extended number by rap star and featured player A$AP Rocky and stirring closing ballad by British singer Aiyana-Lee.
But, as it ever was, this is Denzel Washington's showpiece and covers lots of dramatic turf in depicting a man who has been sure about nearly everything in life, now facing financial and spiritual uncertainty.
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