Clanger: Denzel Washington plays a music mogul in his new movie directed by Spike Lee in an unsubtle mood. Photo: A24/Apple Original Films
Spike Lee and Denzel Washington are one of the most captivating actor-director duos in Hollywood. Right up there with Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio or Ryan Coogler and Michael B Jordan.
I’ll never forget watching Lee and Washington’s towering portrait of African-American revolutionary Malcolm X, originally released in 1992. They also gave us Mo’ Better Blues (1990), He Got Game (1998) and Inside Man (2006).
So, when I found out they were teaming up to deliver a new film titled Highest 2 Lowest, I was excited. I was even more excited when I found out the cast would feature Richard Wright and A$AP Rocky.
The film I watched, released on Apple TV+ on 5 September after a three-week cinema run, was both entertaining and frustrating.
Here’s the plot — David King (Washington) is a New York music mogul with a storied career boasting decades of award-winning music and chart-topping hits. A few years earlier he had sold the majority stake in the record label he founded but now he intends to buy it back to thwart a rival label from executing a hostile takeover.
He’s ready to put all his assets and savings on the line to make this happen, much to the chagrin of his wife Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera), because he believes this is what needs to be done to protect his legacy.
But a monkey wrench gets thrown into the works when King’s son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) and his friend Kyle (Elijah Wright) go missing.
Trey quickly returns home unharmed but Kyle is kept for ransom after the kidnappers mistake him for King’s son. Kyle is the son of King’s chauffeur Paul (Jeffrey Wright) and the kidnappers are demanding $17.5 million for his safe return — a figure they don’t back down on even after they find out about the case of mistaken identity.
The police get involved and it turns out that the kidnapper is an aspiring rapper — Yung Felon (A$AP Rocky).
And this was the frustrating aspect of the story. Lee has never been subtle. His films often have a strong message and sometimes that’s a strength as with his classic Do The Right Thing (1989).
But, at other times, it’s a weakness and you might get the feeling you’re being beaten over the head with that message. Unfortunately, there were moments in Highest 2 Lowest that felt more like the latter.
Without going too far into spoiler territory, Lee seems to have a complicated perspective on hip-hop culture. He’s always loved rap music, and featured the work of artists like Public Enemy prominently in his films but, in this film, he criticises aspects of hip-hop he finds problematic.
And there’s certainly a lot to criticise but I just wish he hadn’t done it in such a clumsy way.
While I appreciate the charisma of an A$AP Rocky performance, the character of Yung Felon is a caricature who functions merely as a convenient vehicle for highlighting the negative aspects of hip-hop.
To shoot Lee some bail, it’s possible that some of the film’s issues could be related to the challenges of redoing others’ work, as Highest 2 Lowest is an adaptation of the 1963 Japanese film High and Low by legendary director Akira Kurosawa, which itself was based on the 1959 American novel King’s Ransom, written by Ed McBain.
But this isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy the film at all. Washington and Wright deliver the kind of high-calibre performances you can reliably expect from them.
And there are some crime-thriller aspects of the story that kept me glued to the screen, especially one of the sequences involving the ransom payment.
So, the film is far from irredeemable but I must admit that I’m glad I watched it at home because, if I had seen it at the cinema, I would have been disappointed.
In the end, Highest 2 Lowest is worth watching for its stellar performances and flashes of Spike Lee brilliance, but its heavy-handed messaging keeps it from reaching the heights of the greatest collaborations with Washington.