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.
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For What it's Worth 