Film review Lee reinvents noir as bold love letter to New York scene

Spike Lee's latest is a brash, pulsing New York adventure and a tender love letter to the city's sports scene and its music.

- Peter Bradshaw

It is a remake (or maybe cover version) of Akira Kurosawa's downbeat noir High and Low from 1963, transplanting the action from Yokohama to the Big Apple - or rather returning it there, as Kurosawa's source material was King's Ransom, an Ed McBain novel set in a fictional stand-in for the US city.

It's got a terrific throb of energy, moving with the rangy grace of its superstar, Denzel Washington. Some of the original's minor-key sombreness and cynicism has been lost, and the modern-day setting creates a small plausibility issue (luckily for Kurosawa, GPS did not exist in his day), but these are minor quibbles.

In Kurosawa's movie, the incomparable Toshiro Mifune plays Gondo, a salaryman who rashly mortgages his family's apartment to buy a controlling stake in the firm he works for.

Just as he is about to pull off the deal, a kidnapper takes a boy he thinks is Gondo's son, but is in fact the child of his heartbreakingly loyal chauffeur, Aoki (Yutaka Sada). Will Gondo now use the money he's borrowed as ransom cash to save the son of a servant?