Spike Lee is showing his age.
That’s not a slight, but simply an acknowledgment of the mature set of concerns on display in his latest film, “Highest 2 Lowest,” a crime drama set in New York.
“Highest 2 Lowest” stars Denzel Washington as David King, a veteran record label mogul whose glory days are behind him. When his world is threatened by a kidnapping extortion scheme, King struggles to remain on top in his industry, protect his family, and ultimately do the right thing.
Lee’s source material is the 1963 classic film, “High Low,” directed by one of Lee’s cinematic godfathers, Akira Kurosawa. “High Low” is itself loosely based on the 1959 novel, “Kings Ransom,” by Evan Hunter. The Kurosawa film takes on archetypal moral dilemmas and presents a critique of Japanese culture under Western capitalism. But Lee ain’t really here for that. On the contrary, he’s here to celebrate New York City, his first true love, and to explore what is at stake when Black excellence, Black family, and the resulting spoils of Black privilege are threatened.
Like Scorsese with his production of “The Irishman,” “Highest 2 Lowest” feels like a reunion tour convened by a film master. Not only is his famed collaboration with Washington revived for a fifth time, but Spike Lee Joint alumni like Wendell Pierce, Rick Fox, Nicholas Turturro, and Rosie Perez show up for random cameos. Indeed, Spike is up to his old tricks and has some new ones up his sleeve. There’s his familiar heavy-handed reliance on syrupy melodramatic scoring to establish intimate dramatic scenes, offset by a shrewdly curated soundtrack with classic old-school bangers. Lee does promotions for the Yankees (instead of the Knicks) while taking several aggressive swipes at Boston sports fans, including an F bomb spit directly into the camera. And, speaking of characters looking directly into the camera, it wouldn’t be a Spike Lee Joint without at least one head-on shot framed with a receding foreground. For extra flex, the camera also does fluttering double-takes for no apparent reason, and “A24,” which happens to be the name of the studio that released “Highest 2 Lowest,” appears conspicuously in one scene as an apartment number.
Denzel’s performance defaults to a kind of road-weary swagger. It’s as if each film from the last 15 years of his career depicts a different shade of the Equalizer walking the earth with an otherworldly self possession. Jeffery Wright co-stars as Paul Christopher, King’s man Friday, whose own family gets dragged into the crime scene, and the film’s most tender and emotionally complicated moments occur between King and Christopher, long-standing friends. Ilfenesh Hadera plays King’s wife Pam, but her character isn’t written thoughtfully enough to take on complexity beyond the proverbial good Black woman at the side of the successful Black man.
A$AP Rocky, cast as Yung Felon, a man attempting to slap the crown from King’s head, chews up every scene he is in, even in moments when we just hear his voice. He radiates with an intensity that veers dangerously close to, but doesn’t fully succumb to, the caricature of a young Black criminally enterprising menace.
There is a sequence in “Highest 2 Lowest” that involves backpacks, motorcycles, and the recently-departed Eddie Palmieri and his orchestra that is slick and delightful, but “Highest 2 Lowest” is mostly a thriller that can’t always sustain the requisite level of tension. When the police are brought in to crack the kidnapping case, they prove to be useless (To comic effect, Lee casts Dean Winters, the actor who plays Mayhem in the Allstate commercials, as an inconsequential blowhard detective), which leads King and Paul to take matters into their own hands. One of the film’s most promising scenes features a music studio stand-off between old-school King and new jack Yung Felon, but it then transitions to a rote shoot-em-up chase through subway stations and over subway cars in which King implausibly goes from desk jockey to sudden action figure.
While there are no autobiographical ambitions like “Crooklyn,” “Highest 2 Lowest” still feels personal and reflective. It’s almost impossible to not see Lee (and a passing resemblance to his family) represented in David King’s life. King is a seventy-ish man who has reached the pinnacle of his entrepreneurial success and creative power. Having long ago left the hood to live in New York luxury, he is at a crossroads as he meditates on a legendary career and what it may have cost him. Meanwhile, you can almost hear a grumpy Spike in King’s voice rail against cell phones, social media, A.I. and a new generation of hip-hop in a way that reveals a man who is uneasy with a contemporary pop culture scene he can no longer make sense of, much less keep up with.
Grounding King in his fancy East River-view apartment are members of a model loving family. Their home is adorned with Basquiat and Kehinde Wiley originals, and images of Black political and creative genius that reinforce a sense of cultural ascendancy. But heavy is the head that wears the crown, and King feels the burdens of living a life in which every one wants a piece of him and his success. When King is given a chance to show himself deserving of his blessings and to make a fairly obvious moral choice between money and his chosen family, he flinches in a way that, unintentionally by Lee, fatally undercuts the content of King’s character and, with it, the moral center of the film.
Similarly, “Highest 2 Lowest” gives Lee the opportunity to make epic, career-defining observations on the impact of material wealth, the obsessive pursuit of attention and relevancy, and the decisions we make along the way. He throws a head fake at these themes, but ultimately brushes right by them. King is more pre-scandal Russell Simmons than post-scandal Puffy; more street-slick Cliff Huxtable than modern day Icarus. And instead of giving us a parable to live by or even a cautionary tale, Lee settles for the simple suggestion that maybe not everyone deserves to be a winner in life, but people like him and King do. Hate the game, not the playa.
Sounds like an Oscar to me!!!!!