Highest 2 Lowest: Denzel Washington – Photo: David Lee
Before seeing the nimble Spike Lee joint Highest 2 Lowest, I watched the best possible preview: Akira Kurosawa’s taut 1963 Japanese thriller High and Low. An adaptation of Ed McBain’s crime novel King’s Ransom, and the blueprint for Lee’s film, High and Low intrigues from the first beat of its ominous opening credits montage of Tokyo cityscapes set to jazz-inflected score.
The film takes its time hatching a diabolical life-or-death dilemma ensnaring a cutthroat businessman portrayed by Kurosawa’s frequent leading man, Toshiro Mifune. Revolving around a kidnapping, the measured first act gives way to a heart-pounding second half, highlighted by the Hitchcockian suspense of a money exchange on a speeding train.
Ever the cinephile, Lee adheres closely to the cinema master’s blueprint. Highest 2 Lowest follows the structure of High and Low faithfully, save for one effective, late-in-the-game twist that Lee and screenwriter Alan Fox inexplicably don’t exploit.
Otherwise, Lee spikes the Kurosawa formula with humor and history, adding the texture and detail of New York City in 2025, of hip-hop and Black culture, and of the mythological stature of his favorite leading man, Denzel Washington.
As raw and immediate a screen presence ever, decades into his illustrious career, Washington is riveting as hip-hop music mogul David King. A confident but wary titan, King lives plush in a penthouse overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge, loved and supported by gorgeous wife Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera), teenage son Trey (Aubrey Joseph), and fierce right-hand man Paul (Jeffrey Wright, lending reliable comic relief).
Following an opening montage of New York cityscapes announcing this film’s fidelity to its source material, Highest 2 Lowest swiftly posits King as master of all he surveys. But his empire might be crumbling.
The bitter King’s continued reign at the company he founded, Stackin’ Hits Records, rides on an extremely risky move that becomes exponentially more precarious when someone close to him is kidnapped. The hostage’s life is on the line, and so is King’s fortune and future.
Highest 2 Lowest: A$AP Rocky – Photo: David Lee
Accordingly, Lee orchestrates a few tense, jazz-inflected set-pieces of his own, from a car-vs-motorscooter chase through the Bronx, to a subway car cat-and-mouse that rivals the best of High and Low. The entire film is exceptionally well-shot by two-time Oscar-nominated cinematographer Matthew Libatique, who also performed duties on Lee’s crime comedy Chi-Raq.
The director lays the plaintive score by Howard Drossin on too thick at times in the quiet moments, but, as usual, assembles a strong soundtrack. Heavy on James Brown and hip-hop, the music is particularly key given the world King inhabits.
In that spirit, several notable rappers and musicians appear in pivotal (and some not so pivotal) roles. Ice Spice’s much-heralded part amounts to a single uneventful scene. Fellow rapstress Princess Nokia also appears in only one scene, yet leaves an indelible impression with an appealing turn as a witness unaware of how much she knows about the crime.
Rap superstar A$AP Rocky truly lights up the screen with his live wire performance in a role that calls for him to face off against acting titan Washington. Rocky more than holds his own, helping deliver the film’s most surprising and satisfying standoff, a fitting spin on the original’s clash between men of opposing classes, both desperate, both ruthless, neither willing to accept defeat.
Highest 2 Lowest (★★★☆☆) is playing in theaters nationwide. Visitwww.fandango.com.
High and Low (★★★★☆) is streaming on HBO Max. Visit www.max.com.
In search of seventeen missing third-graders -- all of whom rose from their beds at 2:17 a.m. the same night, ran from their homes out into the dark, and then vanished -- the desperate adults in Zach Cregger's chilling Weapons go knocking on strange doors, and creeping down hallways they might be wiser to avoid.
Weapons relies heavily, and fruitfully, on the suspense of "Don't go in there! Oh no, she's going in there." The filmmaker's thrilling Barbarian similarly showed a penchant for sending characters down dark, winding paths against their better judgment.
In case you haven't caught up -- or you've given up -- on where we are in the Jurassic World saga, boatloads of dinosaur species were transported from their theme park island to the mainland a couple of sequels ago in Fallen Kingdom.
Now, after a whole sequel, Dominion, to run rampant through cities and towns, and re-acclimate themselves to life on Earth, the dinosaur population in the latest money grab Jurassic World: Rebirth has taken a hit. Acclimating to the changed climate, environments, and co-existence with humans has proved to be more than most dinosaur species can handle.
A veritable buffet of laugh-out-loud sight gags, wordplay, innuendo, and slapstick, The Naked Gun offers up comedy of nearly every flavor, rebooting the cop show-spoofing franchise created by Airplane! masterminds David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker.
The new movie -- directed by Akiva Schaffer (Pop Star: Never Stop Never Stopping), who co-wrote with Dan Gregor and Doug Mand -- lands closer to the snappy, joke-a-second feel of Airplane! than the measured deadpan of the 1988 original The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! starring Leslie Nielsen.
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