At his greatest, Spike Lee retains his viewers on their toes, by no means completely positive the place he would possibly go subsequent. In Highest 2 Lowest, his newest collaboration with Denzel Washington (Mo’ Higher Blues, Malcolm X, He Acquired Sport, Inside Man), Lee is having an absolute blast preserving us off-balance.
Washington headlines this New York Metropolis-set thriller as file exec David King, whose wealth, firm, household, and legacy are thrown into spin when his son is kidnapped for ransom. Washington has particularly been delivering smashing performances as of late in every part from The Tragedy of Macbeth to Gladiator II, however there’s one thing particular right here. You possibly can really feel the belief between him and Lee because the always-exploring filmmaker performs with tone, frequency, movie shares, and continuity to grant Washington the house to experiment and thrive.
Slightly than a chilly ransom drama constructed on the shoulders of a glowering main man, Lee trusts Washington to brandish that signature smile as freely as his Academy Award–profitable snarl. However the film star additionally will get to flex some much less examined strikes and feelings. This makes for some sequences that play peculiarly on a primary watch. However on reflection, what Lee and Washington arrange in a discomforting first act lays the groundwork for a climax that hits like a subway practice.
Highest 2 Lowest delivers a story of mistaken identification and hard-won justice with Spike Lee aptitude.
Aubrey Joseph and Elijah Wright performs buddies in “Highest 2 Lowest.”
Credit score: A24
Screenwriter Alan Fox tailored Highest 2 Lowest from Ed McBain’s 1959 novel King’s Ransom, which was beforehand translated to the display by legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa in 1963 with Excessive or Low. Within the opening credit to Lee’s movie, each are cited as supply materials. All three variations current a rich businessman getting ready to a serious skilled gamble, who’s compelled to pivot his focus — and funds — when a kidnapper abducts his son. Nevertheless, Fox making his businessman a file exec who focuses on creating Black artists provides new dimension to this story.
By making King’s enterprise certainly one of preserving Black tradition and uplifting Black voices, Fox’s script provides richer texture to his battle. Surrendering the cash means his enterprise deal is useless, so to save lots of his son, he dangers sacrificing his skilled legacy — if the cops cannot catch the abductors. After all, his son is additionally his legacy. However what’s going to David do when it seems that the abductors grabbed the improper child? Will he pay $17.5 million, probably going broke and handing over his firm within the course of, for his godson Kyle (Elijah Wright)?
Whereas David, his spouse Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera), and his rattled son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) focus on this matter of their lavish high-rise house — which out of the blue appears much less untouchable — they communicate with an eerie calm. Talking in stilted supply, David and his household appear numb to the gravity of their scenario. Possibly they’re shocked that one thing so low and legal can contact all of them the best way up right here. Or maybe this composure, unusual as it’s, is constructed, a presentation for the general public — the police — who’ve invaded their residence. Possibly the social strain to maintain cool has even impacted how they react in entrance of one another.
There’s little yelling. Actually, when Trey shouts at his father, demanding the ransom be paid for his good friend, the teenager is scolded for the tone he is taken towards his father. As this goes on, a marketing campaign poster for Kamala Harris hangs on the wall behind them. The reminder to be wonderful and smiling even within the face of defeat and indignity is all over the place. Their house is elegantly adorned with icons of Black tradition, framed copies of books by Maya Angelou and Zora Neale Hurston, work, together with a few of Black professional athletes, and pictures of Stevie Marvel, James Brown, and Aretha Franklin, alongside cowl photographs of David King himself.
The Kings rejoice and characterize Black excellence of their work, their charity, and their residence. However is that each one simply discuss if David will not threat his wealth to save lots of Kyle? To reply that query, Lee — because the title suggests — will go away the high-rise to go down, down, down, to the subways of New York Metropolis. Naturally, the 4 practice to the Bronx is the place the handoff is meant to occur.
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When Highest 2 Lowest cuts to the chase, Lee has us by the throat.
Denzel Washington rides the subway in “Highest 2 Lowest.”
Credit score: A24
The movie begins gradual, purposefully so. The primary act drama is all about contracts and high-minded debates about function. However as soon as David straps on a backpack filled with tens of millions to repay the abductors, Lee hits his rhythm with function, delivering a street-smart, character-driven journey by New York Metropolis.
Washington sheds the high-priced fits for an virtually incognito look of all-black informal put on topped with a ball cap. Because the practice fills with Yankees followers, rowdy for sport day, the soundtrack turns into diegetic, by the rousing music from the Puerto Rican Day Parade (with a cameo from Do the Proper Factor‘s Rosie Perez as herself!) occurring under the now-elevated practice. The vitality of all this exercise is propulsive, driving not solely the plot ahead, but additionally pulling audiences to the sting of their seats. When all of the rigorously laid plans of the Kings and the cops go south, my viewers rippled with gasps and even a handful of shouts. Lee had successfully made us bystanders on that practice, invested within the drama prefer it was our personal. And every part that comes after is Lee relishing absolutely the chokehold he has on his viewers — even after the kidnapped teen is recovered.
Slightly than returning King to enterprise as common, King is on a quest to reclaim what he misplaced, and perceive why he misplaced it to start with. This pulls him out of the facade of management that was his places of work, and plunges him onto his outdated stomping grounds within the Boogie Down Bronx, alongside his good friend/driver (a simmering Jeffrey Wright) with a gun on his hip and a showdown with a mysterious rapper referred to as Yung Felon (performed by A$AP Rocky) forward of him.
A$AP Rocky and Denzel Washington are fireplace collectively.
A$AP Rocky performs Yung Felon in “Highest 2 Lowest.”
Credit score: A24
With out giving an excessive amount of of the plot away, King and Felon are destined to come back head to head. The place one got here from the heights of a high-rise, the opposite’s recording in a dirty basement studio. However each are gamblers who made music their greatest threat, and it is finally put them at odds. Rocky, who additionally has a job on this yr’s If I had Legs I Would Kick You, is mesmerizing as this ferocious rapper, spitting bars with the identical confidence he reveals whereas slinging insults at Washington’s King. Washington meets his depth, however not his vitality. The facility dynamic favors the older man, and so Washington leans right into a condescending calm, a king on a throne staring down at a idiot.
Rocky and Washington are extraordinary, channeling ardour, rage, and self-righteousness into explosive exchanges each private and political. These two ship a number of the greatest scene work in a film this yr. However it would not hit as exhausting because it does if it weren’t for Lee’s cautious development of the movie’s first act. To understand the place David finally ends up, you need to perceive the place he was once we first met him.
See, past his enterprise, his household, and his legacy, David is at his core struggling to recapture his ardour for the music. It is an issue his spouse identifies throughout a scolding on the balcony in act one. However it’s a dissonance that Lee units up with the opening music. Although King’s complete profession has been devoted to Black artists in rap and R&B, the music that performs over the film’s first moments — once we first see King excessive up on his Brooklyn balcony overlooking the Manhattan skyline — is “Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin’,” the cheerful farmer tune from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!
Its folksy perspective clashes with the enduring views of New York Metropolis’s city panorama of glass and metal. The jaunty singing of cowboy-hatted Gordon MacRae is willfully jarring towards the stony expression of David King in his sharply tailor-made go well with. It is genuinely humorous — although not as humorous within the deeply NY means as Lee’s later swipes on the Celtics and charming dad jokes about “Jake from State Farm.”
Lee begins by pushing the viewer off-balance with this earnest, out-of-place music, as a result of music mogul David King is so out of contact together with his personal musical inspirations at this second. It is not till King is again on the streets that he can reconnect with that keenness, that vitality of New York that Lee captures so nicely. And there is a twisted pleasure in Washington’s efficiency, recognizing this thrill even because the starvation for it might break King’s complete realm.
Lee is unimaginable. With Highest 2 Lowest, he richly reimagines Kurosawa’s movie inside his personal lens, showcasing Black delight and New York delight with nice pleasure. With this, Lee grants Washington the room to maneuver, taking massive swings as his character does, and delivering certainly one of his greatest performances in a decade. To that, Rocky and the ensemble deliver an intoxicating vibrancy, particularly within the movie’s second half. All of this builds to create an ending that may make you wish to rise up and cheer.
It is a journey. This is a experience. Highest 2 Lowest is Lee and Washington, reunited and good as ever.
Highest 2 Lowest opens in theaters on Aug. 15, debuting on Apple TV+ Sept. 5.
