The latest Spike Lee Joint might not be the director’s tightest, but it is a passion project as playful as it is nostalgic. New York gets a lot of love, as do Spike’s earlier films – Rosie Perez and Nick Turturro show up in pop-off-the-screen bits – and New York sports teams. The last time Lee adapted a film that was considered an untouchable masterpiece (Park Chan-wook’s “Old Boy”) didn’t go so well; it felt flat, a rote redoing. He’s done better here in reenvisioning Akira Kurosawa’s great 1963 kidnap noir, “High and Low” starring the indelible Toshiro Mifune and adapted from Ed McBain’s novel “King’s Ransom,” flipping a shoe executive whose son is targeted for kidnapping during a corporate merger for a music mogul arguably fashioned after Jay-Z. Denzel Washington reunites with Lee for the first time in 19 years (they have five collaborations, with the previous being “Inside Man”) to play the exec, David King, looking to buy back control of his records label when the kidnapping goes down. The ransom is $17.5 million, which is the money David needs to get his Stackin’ Hits back. But there’s a hitch: Who’s snatched from camp is not David’s son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) but Kyle (Elijah Wright), the son of his loyal chauffeur and right hand man Paul (Jeffery Wright, Elijah’s dad IRL), mistaken for Trey by the kidnapper. It’s here that David has a crisis of conscience when he balks at paying for Kyle, causing a rift between David and Paul and raising questions of character and selfishness from David’s wife (Ilfenesh Hadera, elegant with a capital E) and son.
Things shift into action mode when David goes to make a drop to the kidnapper via the subway. The plan by the police to nab the perps goes sideways. Later, Paul and David devise their own plan to get a little payback – cue up the James Brown, dig up that old 9 mm and let’s roll in the Bentley.
While you can feel Lee’s love in every frame, not all of this hangs together. The initial response to a kidnapper’s call is strangely inert, lacking in innate parental urgency, and the score early on is heavy, oddly at times echoing “Robocop” (1990) or something composed by Jerry Fielding. Washington and Wright make the film, though: Wright for his grieving father held in check because of his station in life (he’s an ex-con), while Washington get a lot of big make-or-break scenes that he mostly makes – the ones he doesn’t is more a script and character development issue – most notably his rap battle with A$AP Rocky and man-of-the-house lecture delivered with I will be respected fire when Trey challenges him on not ponying up for Kyle.
Easter eggs and political themes are layered into “Highest 2 Lowest”: A door of an apartment is labeled “A 24” (for the film’s distributor and production partner?); the guns used to get the money back are called “Jake from State Farm” and “mayhem” (David Winters, Mr. Mayhem himself in the Allstate ads, is one of the cops trailing David during the drop and overacts to a near breaking point); then there’s Boston hate, with former Celtic Rick Fox playing himself as the basketball camp’s head coach, while in the subway, packed for a Yankees vs. Red Sox game, it’s Turturro’s rabid NYC fan who leads a “Red Sox suck” cheer. On the more sociotopical side, AI get skewered, ebony alerts are highlighted (they’re like Amber alerts, but for young missing Black people), there’s a sidebar about Puerto Rico being a U.S. afterthought, and the enshrinement of Black culture in the Americas from World War II onward is on display boldly in nearly every room of David’s penthouse with its sweeping views of the Brooklyn Bridge. The whole joint clicks and engages from frame one to the credits. It’s not all smooth, but it does provoke and pop.
For What it's Worth 
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