Spike Lee (Inside Man, Malcolm X, Mo’Better Blues) and Denzel Washington’s (Gladiator II, The Equalizer series, The Tragedy of Macbeth) first collaboration in almost 20 years and their fifth overall, Highest 2 Lowest, masterfully reinterprets and reimagines Akira Kurosawa’s seminal 1963 crime-thriller, High and Low (Tengoku to Jigoku), for the twenty-first century. High and Low, Kurosawa’s adaptation of Ed McBain’s 1959 crime novel, King’s Ransom, inarguably remains both cornerstone not just of 20th-century Japanese cinema and a key, trope-setting entry in the police procedural sub-genre. Deeply textured visually, narratively, and thematically, High and Low reflected contemporary concerns related to Japan’s post-war economic boom and growing inequality. Given its subject matter, High and Low always seemed ripe for re-adaptation and reinterpretation, especially from another point of view, preferably an entirely different…
