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10/9/25 (Thurs)

I shouldn’t be commenting on this since I only watched a small part before giving up. I was excited to learn of this remake of the Kurosawa classic High & Low, directed by Spike Lee, starring Denzel Washington – how perfect is that? The moviemakers retain the basic plot of a businessman who must decide whether to save his employee’s kid at a devastating cost to himself, but shift the setting to a black music producer taunted by a struggling rap artist. I re-watched the original first with friends, then took in the remake.

All of us were stunned at how awful this was in just about every department. The dialogue was irritatingly trite (one friend, a film director, suspects that the actors were adlibbing much of it), Washington and Jeffrey Wright were phoning in their performances, the sets were overwrought (what’s with that horrific art work on the walls of an uber-rich businessman?), and the direction was unimaginative. We tuned out and turned off after 40 minutes, but this was lazy work by pretty much everyone.

The worst part is they clearly didn’t think the theme through. In the original, the businessman is ready to risk financial ruin to rescue his kidnapped child, only to learn that the kidnapper took the chauffeur’s kid by mistake. Relieved that his son is safe, he now has to decide whether to destroy his life over the child of a low worker who he has barely noticed to now. Moreover, we learn in the end that the kidnapper was a poor day worker acting less for the money itself than to bring down a symbol of an unfair society; the businessman’s home was a palace on a hill as viewed from the kidnapper in his hovel down below (hence the superior Japanese title Heaven & Hell). While the businessman was exemplary in his treatment of his employees and others – indeed, giving up his fortune and position for a mere driver’s child – the kidnapper could only see him as representative of a world that lifts some humans while suppressing others.

In Lee’s version, the child kidnapped by mistake is the businessman’s godson, and the chauffeur (the boy’s father) is a close friend. That changes the dynamics considerably. The Japanese version presented a true moral dilemma, the extent to which we’re willing to sacrifice ourselves to help others. Here, the kid is practically family, making the decision, and the sacrifice, more personal. The crime becomes just a standard kidnapping plot as in many other films. Lee missed the point entirely.

Also, it seems (at least in that 40-minute stretch) that the kidnapper is targeting the child out of a personal grudge against the record producer, presumably having been rejected for a music career. That’s already been done with much greater wit and insight in King of Comedy, where the kidnapper, an aspiring comedian, demands only that his TV-star victim put him on television. While there’s no need to follow the Japanese template exactly, the new film revolves again around a personal issue rather than a more pointed societal critique. The only positive point was an impressive delivery by the rapper, who manages to outclass his veteran colleagues in every way in what is reportedly his first acting gig (though I should note that the actor was only viewed in the shadows at the point we bailed out).

Kurosawa’s film has its flaws but, above and beyond the thrill of the story, is a thoughtful examination of serious moral themes. While an American update is a great idea in theory, the result is sadly a depressing example of how not to remake a classic. I won’t be watching the rest.