HIGHEST 2 LOWEST
5.5 / 10
Spike Lee reunites with Denzel Washington for their fifth collaboration in Highest 2 Lowest, a remake of the 1963 Akira Kurosawa film High and Low.
Despite the disaster that was Lee’s Old Boy remake, I was excited going in, but let’s just say I regretted skipping Weapons for this.
Kurosawa’s original is a searing critique of capitalism in post-war Japan. Toshiro Mifune’s Gondo, a wealthy businessman, learns through the film’s moral arc that his humanity matters more than profit, even as he chases the platonic ideal of making the best shoes possible. By contrast, Denzel’s David King is pure capitalist excess, a man who’s lost the “best ears in the business” in his endless pursuit of more. Instead of giving voice to the LOWEST, Spike Lee drowns the story in a gaudy glorification of wealth — and it feels uncomfortably personal, as if King is a stand-in for Spike’s own defensiveness about his success and his place in the arts and black culture. There’s a late shot of King wearing a massive diamond-encrusted crucifix, that’s meant to signal triumph, that instead plays like self-parody.
Stylistically, the film’s first two acts are weighed down by an overbearing, elevator-music score that makes no sense when your lead is supposed to be a Quincy Jones-esque producer. Lee’s many odes to New York City, like Rosie Perez and Anthony Ramos at the Puerto Rican Day Parade, feel indulgent, irrelevant and often out-of-place. The acting is incredibly uneven, undercutting the gravity of many key scenes, and the female characters are underwritten as usual, with opaque and undefined motivations. Oftentimes, the whole thing drifts into Megalopolis territory: absurd when it should be profound.
The third act improves once A$AP Rocky enters the fray and the music shifts, bringing edge and energy, but his character is reduced to a shallow narcissistic nihilist — a far cry from Kurosawa’s tormented kidnapper who brings pathos and finality to the original’s denouement. That shift only serves to artificially elevate King’s arc, which felt completely unearned.
Maybe my expectations were too high, but I walked out giving Highest 2 Lowest a low score: 5.5 out of 10.
Despite the disaster that was Lee’s Old Boy remake, I was excited going in, but let’s just say I regretted skipping Weapons for this.
Kurosawa’s original is a searing critique of capitalism in post-war Japan. Toshiro Mifune’s Gondo, a wealthy businessman, learns through the film’s moral arc that his humanity matters more than profit, even as he chases the platonic ideal of making the best shoes possible. By contrast, Denzel’s David King is pure capitalist excess, a man who’s lost the “best ears in the business” in his endless pursuit of more. Instead of giving voice to the LOWEST, Spike Lee drowns the story in a gaudy glorification of wealth — and it feels uncomfortably personal, as if King is a stand-in for Spike’s own defensiveness about his success and his place in the arts and black culture. There’s a late shot of King wearing a massive diamond-encrusted crucifix, that’s meant to signal triumph, that instead plays like self-parody.
Stylistically, the film’s first two acts are weighed down by an overbearing, elevator-music score that makes no sense when your lead is supposed to be a Quincy Jones-esque producer. Lee’s many odes to New York City, like Rosie Perez and Anthony Ramos at the Puerto Rican Day Parade, feel indulgent, irrelevant and often out-of-place. The acting is incredibly uneven, undercutting the gravity of many key scenes, and the female characters are underwritten as usual, with opaque and undefined motivations. Oftentimes, the whole thing drifts into Megalopolis territory: absurd when it should be profound.
The third act improves once A$AP Rocky enters the fray and the music shifts, bringing edge and energy, but his character is reduced to a shallow narcissistic nihilist — a far cry from Kurosawa’s tormented kidnapper who brings pathos and finality to the original’s denouement. That shift only serves to artificially elevate King’s arc, which felt completely unearned.
Maybe my expectations were too high, but I walked out giving Highest 2 Lowest a low score: 5.5 out of 10.