HIGHEST 2 LOWEST (2025)

Spike Lee has made better films (a few) and worse (quite a few), but never one more unnecessary.  A glossy, but empty remake of Akira Kurosawa’s stunning realization of Ed McBain’s KING’S RANSOM, reconfigured as a suspense-filled experiment in film structure for HIGH AND LOW/’62.  The basic set up remains: cash-strapped mogul holding the line on quality & integrity in his product (Lee swaps out shoes for music) has the rug pulled out from him in the middle of a risky business gamble when his son is kidnapped.  Suddenly his financial maneuvers all meaningless.  Dropping company deal-making for family business, he bites the bullet on bail bargaining to save his son only to discover the kidnappers took the wrong kid; they grabbed the chauffeur’s boy.  Yikes!  Will he still go thru with the payout?  It’s a pulpy plot (hey, Ed McBain/87th PRECINCT - see post directly below!), but what Kurosawa did with it was genre genius.  A long still-life Act One, set entirely inside the family’s apartment.  Short Act Two leaping into movement on the street/in the subway for the cash drop-off.  Act Three a brief presto of a chase, then a quick cadenza of a coda.  (Kurosawa not a Western classical music buff for nothing.)  Lee sticking to usual hostage genre tropes & tripe (second & third act all nonsense - that ultra-coordinated  bail drop!), lets his aging star, Denzel Washington, take the glory where Kurosawa all but pushes Toshiro Mifune out of the pic.  Mifune 42 at the time; Washington older and thicker than you remember, is 71.  Worse, he works too hard to show he’s still got what it takes when he ought to be paring back.  (Call it Kirk Douglas syndrome.)  Over-produced/under-characterized, with a weirdly ineffective ‘cool jazz’ score by Howard Drossin and would-be chart-busting hits to show Washington’s still got ‘the best ears in the biz.’  Where’s Quincy Jones when Spike needs him?

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Go with the obvious choice, HIGH AND LOW.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/07/tengoku-to-jigoku-high-and-low-1962.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Look sharp when Washington & chauffeur Jeffrey Wright investigate a lead at a crummy apartment building.  The apartment number?  A-24.  Get it?  Lame-O, Spike.