Cannes film festival
Akira Kurosawa’s downbeat noir High and Low is retooled with Washington on magnificent form as a record producer whose godson is kidnapped by mistake
Spike Lee has made a brash, bold, big-city movie with this pulsing New York adventure that doubles as a love letter to NYC’s sports and its music. It is a remake (or maybe cover version) of Akira Kurosawa’s classic downbeat noir High and Low from 1963, transplanting the action from Yokohama to New York – or rather returning it there, because the original source material, Ed McBain’s novel King’s Ransom, is set in a fictional city based on the Big Apple.
It’s got a terrific throb of energy and life, moving across the screen with the rangy grace of its superstar Denzel Washington – though a little of the minor-key sombreness and complex pessimism and cynicism of the first film has been lost and the modern technology of GPS (unknown in Kurosawa’s day) has indirectly left it with a very small plausibility issue.
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