So Spike Lee made another adaptation of a classic in Asian Cinema…

This time around we have a loose adaptation of Kurosawa’s High and Low. I say loose but the only thing loose about it is the setting. It still involves a kidnapping with ransom and the moral dilemma of paying for someone that is not your kin. It sticks to that but switches up a few things like Denzel is playing a music mogul instead of a shoemaker. With so much stakes on the line you would think a movie like this would have more drama and suspense, except there’s basically only the opposite. Spike compromises morality for self-righteousness.

The first and second act is filled with goofy levels of acting that are only brought up by the dialogue. Denzel is prolific in nature and continues that streak with his profound and biblical monologues. Casting Jeffrey Wright as the guy everyone wanted his character to be in American Fiction was certainly a choice, and not necessarily a good one. I won’t even say A$AP Rocky was a bad actor, what they did with him was though. In this story, it worked better when you don’t know who or why the antagonist is doing what they do. So, I’m not sure why he was given the third most speaking lines in this movie.

Now we get to the technical side of things. What the hell was going on with the lighting and set design in this movie? First, it’s shot like a soap opera, bright, and with close ups like they’re taking head shots of the actors. And now I’m starting to think the intro with shots of the city was to trick us into thinking it was actually shot in NYC. So many times backdrops looked like blurred city skylines. Lee unapologetically uses that NYC setting to prove to us he likes living there, because this felt more like an ad for the city than a movie with a defined structure. I will say it was nice to see at least one Kurosawa homage in the shot selection, but it was so short lived that the rest of the staging felt like a slap in the face.

Some of this is just painful to get through, but somehow rounds out an ending that is one of the best on the year. There’s no urgency to the central beats of the plot and the score is off beat the entire time. I was amazed, or entranced, watching this movie. I knew it couldn’t be this bad but now I’m thinking that it might be. Spike was so focused on the culture of the people in the movie and NYC that he forgot how to make the other aspects of a movie cohesive and watchable. Maybe watching High and Low for the first time a week before seeing this made for a bad comparison, but also maybe Spike Lee is out of touch once again with this adaptation.

I will be abstaining from a score, but those were my thoughts.