You come at the king, you better not miss – but unfortunately, Yung Felon (A$AP Rocky), an aspiring rapper and first-time kidnapper, who meant to abduct the son and heir of hip-hop mogul David King (Denzel Washington), accidentally grabbed the chauffeur’s boy instead. No matter, he still wants 17.5 million Swiss francs – cash, unmarked, in a black Jordan brand backpack – or the wrong kid dies. The setup of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, adapted from Ed McBain’s novel ‘King’s Ransom’, has been updated for Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, set in up-to-the-second New York City: his son, aged up to a teenager, is a budding influencer whose best friend gets nabbed while buying a chopped cheese a bodega during LIU basketball camp. The chauffeur is Jeffrey Wright, as a five-percenter with a durag and criminal record; he and King go all the way back to the hood together, and share an easy rapport in old-head slang. This gives the bootstrapping, cash-strapped CEO more to think about as he weighs his obligation to another man’s child against his family’s well-being, the demands of his business, and the court of public opinion, all while struggling to do the right thing. King’s been on the cover of Time and Rolling Stone, per the framed photos behind his desk, but despite owning multiple Basquiats and he doesn’t have £15 million liquid – it’s all tied up in a scheme to buy back a controlling interest in his record label from a soulless conglomerate.
In King’s Ransom and High and Low, Douglas King and Kingo Gondo (Toshiro Mifune) were shoe-company CEOs unwilling to compromise on quality; here, King David, as he’s called, is the founder of a Roc-A-Fella – like music company, who once boasted “the best ears in the business,” swimming upstream to reclaim his sense of artistry. 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks founder Lee is likewise an auteur who became a brand, and judging from this movie, he’s as hungry as King is to prove that he’s still got it. He puts himself in the company of the best of Black American culture with references to James Brown and Aretha Franklin, Sula by Toni Morrison and Investiture of Bishop Harold as the Duke of Franconia by Obama presidential portrait artist Kehinde Wiley, while filling out the cast with young stars like Ice Spice and Princess Nokia; he delivers a sprawling NYC panorama in the vintage Lee style, filled with a pungent pan-ethnic supporting cast, gratuitous shoutouts to the Knicks, and Rosie Perez emceeing a Puerto Rican Day salsa concert.
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In High and Low, Kurosawa literalized the gaping class divide in Japanese society by placing Kingo’s mansion on a hill above the slum where the kidnapper lives; here, the scheme is both spatial and geographic. Yung Felon looks up to King on the terrace of his apartment in one of the new high-rise luxury towers in Dumbo near the Brooklyn Bridge, high above Fort Greene Park where Lee shot his much scrappier first feature, and literal and metaphorical miles from his digs in the South Bronx. Both McBain’s novel and Kurosawa’s film are studies of the law-of-the-jungle capitalism of the postwar economic boom, which Lee updates for a more entrepreneurial age with the constant patter of grindset homilies – though we don’t know much about King’s rise out of the ghetto, we can imagine it. Highest to Lowest follows High and Low in changing the novel, having King eventually agree to pay the ransom after many minutes of every-man-for-himself denial and wrenching self-justifications. Alan Fox’s script filters this moral quandary through modern media tropes, as King and his advisors weigh a fear of cancel culture against the realities of celebrity worship in the social-media attention economy, but the film doesn’t develop many original thoughts about the nature of modern stardom, our alternate admiration and suspicion of wealth and privilege, and social attitudes to crime. The moralizing Japanese newspapers whose pro-business, police-friendly editorials were the background noise of High and Low are here replaced by a meagre handful of notably unconvincing facsimiles of memes that characters pull up on their phones and show each other.
The homebound first act of High and Low is largely exposition, with the police listening in on phone calls as Kingo struts and frets like a caged tiger and wrestles with his dilemma. This is fundamentally static material, a limitation which Kurosawa transcended with the greatest widescreen blocking of all time. Lee’s staging is comparatively rushed, flat and antsy (in comparison, what staging wouldn’t be? But even still)… but he does dynamic work when the action leaves King’s apartment and moves onto a Bronx-bound 4 train. He’s always been a filmmaker who feeds on the energy of the city and its people and does great, cacophonous work on the film’s equivalent of the film’s MTA update of Kurosawa’s bullet-train ransom drop, filling the car with screaming Yankee fans on the way to a game and contriving a kidnapping scheme involving a brake bandit and electric moped chase. After Washington’s King claims a movie star’s privilege not afforded to Mifune and overtakes the cops with his own investigation into the kidnapping, Lee returns to the 4 for a subway-surfing fight scene. This is, simply, one of the great New York City subway films – up there with The French Connection, which it references – though there’s also a very unintentionally funny moment in which A$AP Rocky jumps a turnstile, quickly followed by Denzel Washington’s stunt double.
Washington is too old for this part, but also perfect for it. In tailored suits and blingy earrings, he’s an alpha dog who’ll intimidate his own son when challenged but also flash his veneers when glad handling the investor class. He’s presumably dined with presidents, but code-switches when he gets on the phone with the kidnapper, dropping into a peacocking street-corner patois. A$AP Rocky has a mumble-rapper’s standoffish apathy and he draws out notes of musicality and Shakespearean urgency from a very motivated Washington in the first of two confrontations that echo High and Low’s immortal closing scene, with Kingo and the kidnapper staring each other down from opposite sides of a prison’s bulletproof window. Here, King and Yung Felon meet for the first time while separated by the soundproof glass of a recording studio, and producer and artist face off with freestyles and opposing ideas about hustle culture and individualism, black fatherhood, and generational values. It’s far more effective than the second such scene, a mere echo of High and Low that’s followed by a cringey coda celebrating Black Excellence. But you take the good with the bad, the high with the low, all included in the price of admission for a showcase of Spike Lee’s undiminished vitality.
