Highest 2 Lowest IN THEATERS

Denzel Washington gives a peak performance in Spike Lee’s exciting new film

- Tom Gliatto

DRAMA

Director Lee is in an enthralling, expansive mood for this thriller, a remake of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 masterpiece High and Low. At the very start, as Norm Lewis sings “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ ” on the soundtrack, the camera captures—with almost rapturous clarity—the dawn of what promises to be a perfect day over Manhattan’s East River. Then we spot, standing on the penthouse balcony of a gleaming Brooklyn skyscraper, Denzel Washington’s David King. The name’s regal heft is appropriate: He’s a wealthy music mogul renowned for his golden ear, and from sunup to sundown he’s wheeling and dealing—at the moment, he wants to put the brakes on a corporate merger he considers a threat to his label. But his beautiful mornin’ is about to give way to pure hell: Within hours police will inform him that his son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) has been kidnapped and that the ransom is set at 17.5 million Swiss francs.