This film is a mess.
“Sloppy” and “unrestrained” aren’t words I normally associate with a Spike Lee endeavor, but this bewildering drama seems to have been stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster. The effort to blend predatory music biz avarice with a straight-ahead crime/police thriller ultimately fails on both counts.
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| Having ultimately agreed to pay an exorbitant ransom,, David King (Denzel Washington, far right) boards a subway, cash-laden backpack in tow, and awaits a call with the next set of instructions. |
I realize, with respect to the storyline, that King always needs to be seen as The Man With A Plan, but — more often than not — he acts like the host of a particularly silly
TV game show. And Lee let him get away with this?
Advance publicity has highlighted the fact that Lee’s film, scripted by Alan Fox, is adapted from Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 film, High and Low, which starred Toshirô Mifune. Less attention is paid to the fact that Kurosawa’s film was adapted from Ed McBain’s 1959 novel, King’s Ransom, 10th in his 87th Precinct series.
No surprise, Lee’s third-generation adaptation bears only faint resemblance to McBain’s novel, which shows poor judgment. McBain was an accomplished writer and plotter; Fox is neither. That said, the core plot has been updated to reflect today’s social media obsession, which adds an intriguing element.
Longtime Manhattan-based music mogul David King (Washington), once a mover and shaker who championed numerous young talents in the early 21st century, now is regarded as “past it.” He sold off majority interest in his company years back, in order to finance the lavish lifestyle enjoyed with his wife, Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera), and their son.
But now his beloved label, Stackin’ Hits Records, faces a buyout from a rival — Stray Dog Enterprises — that would exploit all the artists’ songs by turning them into TV commercial jingles (a fate worse than death). King concocts a Hail Mary plan to buy the shares belonging to partner Patrick Bethea {Michael Potts), in order to regain control, thus allowing him to rejuvenate the label ... but this will require leveraging all of King’s personal assets.
King’s chauffeur and longtime best friend, Paul Christopher (Jeffrey Wright), is an ex-con who nonetheless is regarded as family. King is godfather to Christopher’s son, Kyle (Elijah Wright), and the two teens also are inseparable besties. Christopher’s wife died years back, so Kyle means everything to him.
On the day King expects to finalize his deal, he gets an anonymous phone call from a kidnapper claiming to have abducted Trey; the ransom demand is $17.5 million in Swiss 1,000-franc notes (an amount, in that currency, that can be stuffed into a single large backpack).
King and Pam contact the police. Three detectives arrive to handle the case: Higgins (Dean Winters), Bell (LaChanze) and Bridges (John Douglas Thompson). Although the latter assumes command, Higgins senses Christopher’s checkered past, and starts asking pointed questions that trigger the chauffeur’s temper.
Winters badly overplays Higgins’ attack-dog personality, making the guy look like a one-dimensional racist.
Lee and Fox toy with us for awhile, but sharp-eyed viewers — who clocked the green head band traded between Trey and Kyle, during basketball camp — will anticipate what has happened. When Trey shows up unharmed, everybody realizes that the kidnappers got the wrong person.
But that doesn’t change the ransom demand.
This, then, is the story’s moral dilemma: If King had been willing to follow procedure by paying the ransom, in order to get his son back and increase the detectives’ probability of finding the kidnappers, will he do the same for his chauffeur’s son? Even if the man is his best friend?
Needless to say, this puts a severe strain on King and Christopher’s relationship.
Wright, also an excellent actor, makes Christopher the story’s most credibly persuasive character. I wish Washington were similarly controlled.
In fairness, at times Washington has a lot on his plate. Pam and Trey are appalled by King’s initial uncertainty — the detectives’ presence doesn’t help much — and we can read the weight of possibly disastrous consequences on Washington’s face.
Once a decision is made, the story slides into its second-act action sequence, as King and his carefully bugged backpack follow telephoned instructions, with detectives and cops tracking him every step of the way. The potentially riveting intensity of this process, however, is undercut by constant cutting to the Eddie Palmieri Salsa Orchestra’s performance during the South Bronx’s National Puerto Rican Day Parade.
This becomes very distracting, and effectively kills the story’s momentum.
But that’s nothing, compared to what happens in the third act. Fox’s story goes completely off the rails, and Washington is faced with the impossible task of trying to make King’s behavior seem rational. It’s as if an entirely different movie suddenly got spliced into the mix.
Cinematographer Matthew Libatique occasionally succumbs to needlessly weird camera angles, and Howard Drossin’s sweeping orchestral score — lovely in its own right — feels completely wrong in this setting, particularly when intercut with rap tunes.
Palmieri is just one of many showcased musicians. As befits the story’s setting, guitar-playing June York (Jensen McRae) sings a tune in an effort to impress King; Grammy nominee A$AP Rocky enjoys a lengthy solo in the third act; Bronx rapper Ice Spice pops up as the kidnapper’s romantic partner (but doesn’t perform); and soul singer Aiyana-Lee gets a showcase moment as the film concludes.
By this point, however, we’ve long ceased to care. It appears that Lee and Fox also lost interest, because they end the story on an unsatisfying note.
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