Review: 'Highest 2 Lowest' shows Spike Lee at his most dynamic and sometimes self-indulgent, and cements Denzel Washington's legend status
Part crime thriller and part morality drama, “Highest 2 Lowest” has moments that are dynamic, breath-taking, self-indulgent, overwrought, implausible and authentic all at once — in other words, it’s a Spike Lee joint.
What makes “Highest 2 Lowest” undeniably watchable, in spite of Lee’s occasional excesses, is that the director has teamed for the fifth time with Denzel Washington, who can seemingly do no wrong.
Washington plays David King, a music mogul who still is called “the best ears in the business,” decades after his early-aughts heyday. David lives in a luscious Brooklyn penthouse, with an impossibly gorgeous view of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan skyline from the balcony. It’s a multi-room apartment decorated with Basquiat paintings and other artwork, where David, his wife Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera), and their 17-year-old son, Trey (Aubrey Joseph), live an undeniably good life.
Also living in the apartment are the Kings’ good friend and chauffeur, Paul Christopher (Jeffrey Wright), who has a son, Kyle (Elijah Wright), who’s Trey’s age and his best friend.
As the movie begins, David is engineering a complex and expensive deal to buy back controlling interest in the record label he founded. It’s a gamble — one that has David risking the penthouse, the family’s vacation home and pretty much all of their fortune.
Before the deal goes down, though, David gets a disturbing phone call, informing him that Trey has been kidnapped. The ransom is $17.5 million, an amount that would bankrupt the Kings and make the deal null and void. The Kings call the cops, and soon the three main detectives (John Douglas Thompson, LaChanze and Dean Winters) are working the case — which includes interrogating the quick-tempered Paul.
In short order, though, the Kings find out that Trey is safe — and that the kidnappers grabbed Kyle by mistake. But when the kidnapper calls back, still demanding the ransom, David faces a moral dilemma about whether to pay the money, and risk his business, for someone else’s son.
Film buffs will recognize the scenario as the plot of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 masterpiece “High and Low,” which starred Toshiro Mifune as the businessman facing this difficult choice. That movie and this one are inspired by the Ed McBain novel “King’s Ransom,” and screenwriter Alan Fox mines both the book and the Kurosawa movie for material — along with Lee’s regular obsessions, like the Knicks, the Yankees and the endless variety of New York neighborhoods.
There’s one set piece that ranks among the best work Lee has ever done: A sequence where David has to hand off a backpack with the ransom, shot through a lively Puerto Rican neighborhood festival. (The salsa legend Eddie Palmieri, who died Aug. 6 at 88, and his band provide the diegetic musical accompaniment that adds to the sequence’s tightrope tension.)
There’s another noteworthy sequence where Washington’s David faces off in a rap battle with a character played by A$AP Rocky. I won’t describe it further, but it gives Washington a chance to showcase how versatile and compelling an actor he always has been.
With those two sections in his movie, Lee earns the right to go overboard elsewhere in the movie, with radical tone shifts and an action-movie ending that undercuts a lot of what Lee and his cast — particularly Washington and the constantly arresting Wright — have done to that point. “Highest 2 Lowest” does, indeed, have its high and low points, but the best parts make up for the lesser passages.
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‘Highest 2 Lowest’
★★★
Opens Friday, August 15, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language throughout and brief drug use. Running time: 133 minutes.