By M. Faust

Here’s the elevator pitch synopsis of Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, his first collaboration with star Denzel Washington since 2006: A successful businessman is horrified to learn that his son has been kidnapped and is being held for ransom. He is relieved to learn that the kidnapper mistakenly took the wrong boy. But the one they took is the son of his chauffeur, and the kidnapper still wants the ransom. Does he pay it, even if it will ruin him financially?

David King (yes, you’re meant to think of the Biblical King David; no, I don’t know why) is the mogul behind a record label that owned the charts in the 2000s. It is no longer cutting edge, and his partners want to accept an offer from a big corporation that King suspects will cut loose the up-and-coming artists he has been nourishing to focus on monetizing the label’s hits by licensing them for commercials. Going behind his partners backs, King has raised funding to  buy back full control of the label, liquidating his personal assets and borrowing the rest. He’s willing to use that money to buy the return of his beloved son, consequences be damned. But when it turns out to be someone else’s boy — well, will it be his fault it that boy is killed?

If this sounds familiar, you may have seen 1963’s High and Low, widely considered one of Akira Kurosawa’s masterpieces (though less well known to most American filmgoers than his samurai classics). You may even have read the novel on which it was based, King’s Ransom, one of Ed McBain’s “87th Precinct” series of police procedurals.

But while Kurosawa’s grandson was a producer on this project, Lee’s adaptation is anything but a slavish remake. Quite the opposite: it short shrifts so much of the original story that after a while you start wondering where Lee’s real interest lies. King’s moral dilemma, which would seem to be the central point of the story, isn’t even resolved onscreen: we cut from a scene of him discussing it with his son to him announcing his decision to Paul, the chauffeur. 

That’s another way that Lee and scripter Alan Fox water down the expected conflict. In previous versions,  the chauffeur was an employee whom King considered a weak-willed loser. Here, as played by Jeffrey Wright, Paul is a childhood friend whom King has stuck with through troubles that include a stint in prison. Their children have grown up as best friends, and any attempt to create suspense out of whether King will pay the ransom is half-hearted at best. I won’t spoil any more of it, but the plot gets even more hackneyed in the film’s final third as Lee and Fox throw plausibility out the window. 

So what is Lee’s real interest here? It seems to be a roundabout examination of the state of the music industry, which he has critiqued in the past. The title seems not to refer to social stratification as it did for Kurosawa but to high and low art, with the dragged-out ending providing unnecessarily long examples of both. In other words, hardly the stuff to put millions of asses in seats unless you disguise it as a thriller.

Lee hasn’t had a box office hit in a long time, presumably because he has been pursuing projects closer to his heart. (This morning brought news that ESPN has cancelled the latest, a docuseries on Colin Kaepernick. Such are the times we live in.) He has always been capable of delivering a mass audience-friendly thriller when he wants to, and there are times when this could have been one of those.

A lengthy midfilm section in which King delivers the ransom money during a Yankees game is easily the highlight of the movie, crisply edited to a terrific salsa performance by Eddie Palmieri and his band. It makes you wonder how Lee could be so canny with his use of music here and yet so clueless elsewhere, when he slathers an orchestral score so heavily over dramatic scenes that he seems to be trying to drown the actors out. (Badly used as it is, the score itself, by Howard Drossin, is lovely, reminiscent of the music that Bill Lee provided for his son’s first few films, particularly Do the Right Thing. The elder Lee died in 2023, probably when this film was in pre-production: was Drossin’s score designed as a tribute?)

Should any of this make you interested in seeing or re-seeing the films of Akira

Korosawa, the North Park is currently running his The Hidden Fortress (1958), the

samurai adventure that was George Lucas’ inspiration for the original Star Wars.

It runs through Thursday, to be followed by Throne of Blood (1957), which

transposes Shakespeare’s MacBeth to feudal Japan.