PREMISE
When a titan music mogul is targeted with a ransom plot, he is jammed up in a life-or-death moral dilemma.
THE GOOD STUFF
DENZEL AND JEFFREY- Of course, these two have the best two performances in the movie, given who these men are. But it can also be said that they carry the first two acts of this movie. This is a movie with a glaringly uneven script, and it’s a testament to the skill of both these men that they can ground some of the absolute banality that this movie offers at times. Denzel has many scenes in this film where he’s saying a lot while speaking no dialogue. His facial expressions are everything. And it responds to many of the things being said and to various scenarios presented to the character. Dare I say that Jeffrey Wright has the best performance in the entire film, especially since this film is being marketed as a crime thriller.
THE MUSIC (The good)- On one hand, one could argue that this is the best musical soundtrack to any film in 2025. The film’s composer is Howard Drossin, and he deserves a lot of credit. Standing on its own, the music in this film is incredible to listen to. At all times, it feels as if there’s a 16-piece jazz orchestra watching the movie with the audience and playing along as they go. This is, of course, a Spike Lee joint, so a jazzy type Ernest Dickerson-ish score should be expected by those who really know. However, this score is significantly more lavish than those of other Spike Lee joint scores that I can recall.
Also noteworthy is the appearance of the late Eddie Palmieri and his band in the best musical sequence in the entire movie, by far.
THE CRIME THRILLER SECTION- Here’s the thing, it’s almost impossible to say that this movie is completely unrecommendable. When this movie is, in fact, the CRIME THRILLER IT ADVERTISED ITSELF TO BE, it is an excellent movie that presents a lot of interesting ideas. The end of the second / beginning of the third act goes on to prove that Spike should probably try this crime thriller thing again before he hangs it up… If he ever does.
THE BAD STUFF
THE MUSIC (THE BAD)- As good as the music itself is on its own, three things are happening all at once that nullify the musical effect.
First off, the music’s too loud. It doesn’t drown out the dialogue or anything like that, but there are scenes where there will be no music in the background, and then all of a sudden this 16-piece orchestra comes thundering in in this way that is honestly jarring. Secondly, the music does not match what’s happening on screen. Somehow, the Puerto Rican Day parade aligns with the events on screen, but everything else is mismatched. Thirdly, I somewhat dislike how the score remains consistent throughout these meaningful dialogue exchanges in the first two acts. The music in those moments needed a lot more subtlety and that was just not on the menu with this movie.
THE UGLY STUFF
THE “OLD-HEAD” PERSPECTIVE- Though I do appreciate the “old-head” sentiment that the movie has towards the process of what makes great artistry, how social media and the internet corrupt that, and the music business in general, I do think that that particular message belongs in a different movie than this one. Once the music business side of this story arrives in the third act, many important characters from the first half of the film, when the movie was in crime thriller mode, fall by the wayside.
The end of the third act really hammers home the significance of artistic integrity. But it does that in a very preachy sort of way. Mind you, this is a movie written by a man in his 50s, directed by a man in his late 60s, and starring a man who just started his 70s. This “back in my day” type delivering of this message is just not what this movie needs to convey.
ASAP ROCKY- If you ask me, ASAP Rocky is barely a good rapper, more or less a decent actor. Throughout the first act, he’s present only through voiceover work, and even then, it sounds like he’s reading his lines directly from flashcards held in front of his face. When the third act of this film chooses to focus on his character distinctly, it comes very close to derailing. In fact, I will say that his performance is so jarringly terrible that it takes a performer the likes of DENZEL F****** WASHINGTON to bring some semblance of balance to contrast a horrific performance like this.
He’s one note, he’s wooden, he’s mumbling a third of the time, and when he’s not doing any of the mumbling, he’s wildly overacting just by shouting every line possible. Spike Lee could have literally picked anybody to do this. He could have chose any black actor off of any TV show that is around the age range of ASAP Rocky to come to New York to film this thing, and they would have added way more class to this role then Rocky even remotely capable of doing.
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Perhaps more than any other film Spike Lee has released in the last decade or so, this film really defines what it stylistically means to be a “Spike Lee Joint.” I know that’s put on every one of his films, and technically speaking every movie directed by him is his “joint” so to speak… But more of Spike Lee’s movies stylistically convey what this means (CLOCKERS, DO THE RIGHT THING, THE 25TH HOUR, Jungle Fever) than some of his other films. (Miracle at St anna, oldboy, Da 5 Bloods, chi-raq) To an old school Spike fan like myself, it was actually welcoming to see what I can only describe as the casually organized messiness of a throwback kind of Spike Lee joint.
Denzel is retiring soon. He has said that over and over again. He’ll be 71 in December. I hope he and Spike have one more run in them before either one of them calls it a day. They gotta. This can’t be the send-off. Not this.
HIGHEST 2 LOWEST is on Apple TV+
