Spike Lee's latest, a reheat of Kurosawa's High and Low (1963) which drew on Ed McBain's novel King's Ransom (1959). A surfeit of raw material!
Denzel Washington leads, somewhat ruefully and at times with excessive force, as a music mogul still with the best ears in the business despite his autumnal years. Notionally he had it all before losing control of his record label so we're shown a series of airless business meetings that aim to put things right. (Wendell Pierce (Superman (2025)) got a very few moments to administer an unsatisfying coup de grâce that we somehow know is not going to be consequential.) This setup had little relevance to the main thread where "Yung Felon" A$AP Rocky abducts a son and stars in a few music videos. I enjoyed Jeffrey Wright's performance (as a bottled-up but explosive older felon) far more than I usually do; a career-best effort even? Ilfenesh Hadera as Denzel's wife was static. Rosie Perez got a cameo that reminded me of White Men Can't Jump (1992) and I had to wonder what could have been.
Along those lines: the story and editing were too disjointed for me to fully grasp Lee's point. There's money versus morality but nowadays the currency is not just cash and hits on the archaic music charts (if it ever just was) but also likes on social media and avoiding the omnipresent opprobrium of the mob. (Lee misses a trick by not equating the vacuous, manufactured, soulless pop music that has historically dominated the charts with present-day influencer chic.) Doing the right thing apparently leads to more success and therefore more luxe consumption. Some parts felt like a retread of Mo' Better Blues (1990), which contends that the entirety of American culture is due to the efforts of Black people, but this lacks a Wesley Snipes to take the edge off Denzel. The cops were useless and the well-worn class distinctions were observed.
Dana Stevens. Intercutting the Puerto Rican Day Parade footage with the high-stakes train sequence did not work for me either. A glitchy screenplay. Manohla Dargis. Uneven casting. Things between men stood against the patriarchy of the family. Peter Sobczynski. But the first half is boilerplate ...
