Highest 2 Lowest

For many years, Spike Lee was a household name as a film collector, film school student, film critic, and film lover. {Do the Right Thing}, {25th Hour}, and {He Got Game} are three of my absolute favourite films, and {Malcolm X}, {Inside Man}, and {Summer of Sam} are all remarkable in their own way and well-worth watching. However, it was after this, around 2006, that I believe Lee lost his ability to tell an interesting story, as his previously exciting way of portraying a vibrant, culturally explosive, and diverse New York as a character in itself died out. {The Miracle at St. Anna}, {Oldboy} (remake), {Pass Over}, and {Da 5 Bloods} were all subpar films from a previously brilliant director, and now that he has tackled the iconic 1950s book {King's Ransom} written by Evan Hunter, it's difficult not to feel massive disappointment.

{King's Ransom} was already adapted for film in 1963 ({High and Low}) by none other than the master himself, Akira Kurosawa ({Seven Samurai}, {Ran}, {Yojimbo}, {Tora Tora Tora}), and revolves around a wealthy big boss of a shoe manufacturing empire who is backed into a corner when his private driver's son is kidnapped and he is demanded large sums of money to free him. In Lee's remake, {King} is neither a strict Japanese business genius nor a manufacturer of walking shoes, he is New York's most powerful record company executive and a hip-hop mogul with enough diamond-studded "swag'" to suffocate a large animal.

David King faces a dilemma when his fledgling record label empire is threatened by an aggressive takeover from a competitor, and in the midst of this, his driver and best friend Paul's adult son is kidnapped with a ransom of £175 million posed to David. However, the moral dilemma that Evan Hunter so cleverly navigated in the book, and which Kurosawa so skilfully portrayed in his 1960s adaptation, is mostly lost in Lee's version. David King wants to use the money to save his life's work instead of paying the kidnappers, and despite a good premise, everything is botched here.

Denzel Washington is too old for the role, too uninteresting in his interpretation, and Spike Lee's direction here is, for the most part, disastrous.

Kurosawa's film still stands up thanks to its superb script, brilliant acting, a difficult portrayal of moral duty versus greed, and brilliant photography. {Highest 2 Lowest} fails because none of these aspects ever work. Not for a second. The script is overwritten and crammed with self-satisfaction. The dialogue rarely feels natural, and the way Denzel Washington is given free rein to drag out scenes and improvise chronic repetitions makes it feel like he is too often directly parodying his own Oscar-winning role in {Training Day}. David King's ambitions as a businessman never feel credible or motivated, and his relationship with his wife, son, and private driver never feels like anything other than superficially contrived, making the 133 minutes of Lee's interpretation feel like 333 minutes.

It doesn't help that the cinematography here, especially in comparison to Kurosawa's brilliant original, is deplorable. Lee's fixation on zoomed-out full shots from the strangest of angles in this film often feels like images from a clumsy rehearsal of a play, and when he shifts from lifeless full shots to jump cuts at machine-gun speed during certain dialogue sequences, it's hard not to laugh out loud. The music is even worse. Lee has used every conceivable clichéd, schmaltzy suspense track from the 90s that Hollywood's archives have to offer and plays the crap in an endless loop, even though many of the scenes don't require music at all.

When Washington (the greatest of our time, in my opinion) fails to convince for a single second and feels like he's just jumping between his own already worn-out tropes, and when the story is a weak copy with no sense of tempo, drive, human morality, or suspense, it's easy to dismiss {Highest 2 Lowest}. Spike Lee has truly lost all his ability to captivate, and just as in the case of his utterly disastrous interpretation of {Oldboy}, this is an insult to Kurosawa's remarkable classic.