The 1959 Ed McBain crime novel “King’s Ransom” has crossed the Pacific Ocean twice now, and its latest screen incarnation, “Highest 2 Lowest,” makes for a disarming hand-off from the stern gravity of Akira Kurosawa to the exuberant restlessness of Spike Lee.
It’s also serious where it counts — in its reminder that cheapening a product, the thing you make, helps a bottom line only so long. In the McBain novel as well as the 1963 Kurosawa drama “High and Low,” the protagonist’s business was shoes. In “Highest 2 Lowest,” Lee and debut feature screenwriter Alan Fox trade footwear for music, with Denzel Washington as a celebrated record label executive facing a kidnapping crisis, a scramble to hang onto everything he’s worked for and a battle for his own soul.
Some of that is handled on the story’s surface. The best of it carves through that surface. “Highest 2 Lowest” works with all the freedom and genre crisscrossing director Lee embraces so readily, as his latest, open-hearted valentine to New York City frames the ransom narrative.
That narrative unfolds in the neighborhood of Kurosawa’s version for about an hour. Music mogul David King (Washington) may be struggling to keep his empire together, as we learn, but the wry, ridiculously white opening-credits underscoring of “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” accompanying elegant footage of King’s penthouse view of the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan beyond it, sets up a story of Black enterprise and the high cost of selling out.
King, his regal wife Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera) and their son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) share a luxe Brooklyn waterfront perch with King’s friend and driver Paul (Jeffrey Wright), whose own son Kyle (Elijah Wright, Jeffrey’s real-life son) is Trey’s best friend. At basketball practice, an unknown kidnapper grabs King’s son for a $17.5 million ransom, only to learn he abducted Kyle, not Trey.
“Highest 2 Lowest” follows the same route, more or less, as Kurosawa’s “High and Low” up until King drops the ransom money from a moving subway. Then director Lee remaps the story, so that King’s music milieu is exploited in intriguing and unexpected ways. A lot of detail work pays off; at one point, preceding a sharply realized encounter between Trey and his father in Trey’s bedroom, we see crestfallen Trey, safe at home but guilt-wracked for his abducted friend, doom-scrolling through conspiracy theories suggesting this “nepo baby” staged the kidnapping for personal gain.
Lee’s film offers many rewards, many of them performance-based. These rewards may cost you some pocket change in terms of plausibility and such. The wealthy, somewhat callous protagonist (Washington here, Toshiro Mifune back in ‘63) initially balks at paying the ransom money and wiping out his business to save his friend’s son’s life. Does changing your mind and doing the right thing when an innocent life hangs in the balance constitute a true and compelling crisis of conscience in “Highest 2 Lowest”? Or just a strategic delay? The latter for me. Other snags are purely visual, notably the capper to the scene where King must toss the bag of ransom millions at a specific time and place, from a speeding elevated train. The capper relies on such an insane bit of coincidental timing, you may feel as if you’re experiencing a series of micro-strokes watching it play out.
But then, you know, you move on, because the payoffs that actually pay off more than compensate. Watching Washington and Wright share any of their scenes in “Highest 2 Lowest” is pure pleasure. They’re two of the greatest screen actors we have, that’s all.
Wright can take a simple line like “Am I being detained?” and turn it into a summit of desperate meaning; it comes when Wright’s character, pressing for police cooperation in the botched kidnapping, nearly loses his self-control because the cops in the King’s penthouse are losing theirs. Washington, meantime, gives King not just stature, but ripples of conflict and doubt. The storyline needs them, and needs an actor who keeps us guessing. Scripted or improvised, at one point King expresses a private moment of rage wordlessly, pretending to finger-shoot a couple of weaselly colleagues after they’ve left his office, and then turning the pretend gun on himself. It’s not played for laughs. Washington plays it for something a lot more interesting.
Throughout, Lee treats this project with a generous viewfinder, as he and masterly cinematographer Matthew Libatique scope out everything from Eddie Palmieri, Rosie Perez and Anthony Ramos at the Puerto Rican Day parade to Nicholas Turturro screaming “BOSTON SUCKS!” directly to the camera, warming the hearts of Yankees fans everywhere, none more devoted than the director of “Highest 2 Lowest.”
A model of conventional thriller suspense, the movie isn’t. A stimulating cry for “Black culture and artistic integrity,” in King’s words, and for the true value of a well-made commodity, whether it’s shoes or songs — that, the movie surely is.
“Highest 2 Lowest” — 3 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: R (for language throughout and brief drug use)
Running time: 2:13
How to watch: Premieres in theaters Aug. 15; streaming on Apple TV + Sept. 5.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
