Spike Lee’s ‘Highest 2 Lowest’ reimagines Kurosawa with Denzel Washington

Denzel Washington in “Highest 2 Lowest". Photo / David Lee, Apple TV+

You expect a measure (or three) of idiosyncrasy from a Spike Lee movie; few major filmmakers follow their muse with such ornery dedication. So if Highest 2 Lowest is Lee’s most ambitious and expansive work in some time, the movie also plays defiantly on the director’s own terms. We have to come to Spike, not the other way around, but when he’s accompanied by Denzel Washington – the duo’s fifth big-screen collaboration in 35 years – attention must be paid.

On top of that, Highest 2 Lowest is Lee’s remake of High and Low (1963), a tense moral thriller that has come to be recognised as one of Akira Kurosawa’s greatest achievements. The nerve! The cheek! And given how badly Lee stumbled the last time he tried to remake an Asian movie – 2013’s Oldboy a quixotic redo of Park Chan Wook’s 2003 cult classic of the same title – the potential masochism!

Thankfully, Lee hasn’t tried to remake Kurosawa so much as re-adapt the 1959 Ed McBain novel King’s Ransom on which both movies are based. And he’s brought it into the here and now with sweeping panoramas, juicy performances and a crackling sense of urgency. The thing feels immense, but it moves.

Washington stars as David King, a wealthy and powerful music mogul who’s at the top of the heap but a few years off his game, and it’s fair to say that New York City co-stars as the town King thinks he has long since tamed. He’s Jay-Z and Berry Gordy and Quincy Jones with a pair of gold-plated Beats by Dre headphones, overseeing his domain from a penthouse suite at the tippy-top of a skyscraper with a smart, chic wife, Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera) and their teenage son, Trey (Aubrey Joseph). Highest 2 Lowest opens with an outrageously wide-screen rendition of Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ (from the musical Oklahoma!) as the camera takes in a waking Manhattan, and we’re invited to wonder what could possibly go wrong.

Plenty. While King is pondering whether to sell his label to another company or buy it all back and start again, a kidnapping occurs. The police are called; a rapid-response team sets up in King’s living room; the kidnapper demands $17.5 million in Swiss 1000-franc notes. But then, a twist: it’s Trey’s friend Kyle (Elijah Wright), the son of King’s chauffeur Paul (Jeffrey Wright, Elijah’s real-life father), who has been taken. The kidnapper acknowledges the mistake yet still demands to be paid, and Highest 2 Lowest bores in on King’s ethical quandary: will he spend the money – money he desperately needs to rescue his business – to save another man’s son?

Like Kurosawa’s film, this starts as an executive-suite thriller, but where the early scenes of High and Low employed a terse, almost journalistic tone, Lee opts for opera. Highest 2 Lowest cinematographer Matthew Libatique sends the camera swirling through the boroughs, and Howard Drossin’s orchestral score is high and loud in the mix – an in-your-face choice that matches the chutzpah of director, star and lead character.

Washington plays this king of the city with a swagger born of the streets and a complacency he feels is his due; part of the movie’s drama is – or should be – David King’s humbling. But this actor is never better than when he’s playing brilliant, bullish men with a gift for strategising, and it’s fascinating to see Washington’s rhythms syncopate with those of Wright as King’s hot-tempered ex-con adviser and friend. The two were also in 2004’s The Manchurian Candidate, and their scenes together are as close as the movies come to a high-voltage jazz duet.

(That said, the moments where Washington gets to improvise his solos are choice, including a beautiful throwaway bit where King points a casual finger gun at a departing traitor and then himself.)

Aubrey Joseph, left, and Elijah Wright play friends, Trey and Kyle. Photo / David Lee, Apple TV+, A24

Jeffrey Wright in “Highest 2 Lowest". Photo / David Lee, Apple TV+, A24

Highest 2 Lowest is a crowded subway car of a film, with cops, co-workers, petitioners and pretenders all bustling through, while the city itself sits in judgment in the background via social media and the tabloids. The movie has its flat, talky spots, but once the ransom plans come together, it lifts off into a delirious sequence set on the 4 Train headed for Yankee Stadium, the cars jammed with Bronx Bombers fans – Lee makes sure to have an extra yell “Boston sucks!” straight to the camera – while King panics about making a money drop and the police chase the kidnappers right through the middle of the annual Puerto Rican Day parade where salsa legend Eddie Palmieri (RIP) leads his band in setting the scene’s furious tempo.

Lee has kept the bones of McBain’s and Kurosawa’s versions, but he’s made his own movie, occasionally for worse but mostly for better. There’s nothing here as harrowing as the “Dope Alley” sequence in High and Low or the way Kurosawa slowly widens a police procedural until it acquires the metaphysical force of a Dostoevsky novel. Instead, Highest 2 Lowest brings on the gifted rapper-actor A$AP Rocky as a fiery yin to King David’s cool-cool yang, a reminder of the hero’s street-level beginnings who, in perhaps the movie’s most audacious gambit, engages him in a confrontation that becomes an electric rap duel between the highest and the lowest.

Lee takes a lot of risks here and many of them work, but the film’s comparatively upbeat ending is one of the few things that disappoints. (So are the movie’s overlength and a pleasant but unnecessary musical number to cap things off.) Toshiro Mifune’s hard-nosed executive is a changed man by the end of High and Low, and the same might not be said of this movie’s King. But if Highest 2 Lowest is a lesser creature than its predecessor (and Lee may be enough of a Kurosawa fanboy to want to keep it that way), it’s faster, flashier, funkier and one of the best.

Three stars. Rated R. At theatres (and streaming September 5 on Apple TV+). Language throughout, brief drug use. 133 minutes.