Reviews: 'Weapons' and 'Highest 2 Lowest'
Shorter takes on new releases from Zach Cregger and Spike Lee
Weapons
Zach Cregger’s follow-up to his horror hit Barbarian is bigger and more narratively intricate, though it’s still very much a film built on the gleeful hopping from one character’s perspective to the next.
Those characters are all orbitting a tantalizing mystery: Why did all but one child in the same third-grade classroom abruptly rise from bed one night and run away?
After a quick voiceover and accompanying montage explaining the situation, Weapons begins in earnest about one month after the disappearances. Parents are still agitated and grief-stricken, police are still baffled, and the children’s teacher (Julia Garner) remains a pariah and the subject of an increasingly loud witch hunt.
Weapons has all the makings of a rousing, nail-biter of a conspiracy thriller, and it’s at its best when Cregger balances intrigue with bursts of sharply observed, absurdly funny character detail. He has a terrific sense of off-kilter framing and composition, in finding bizarre and unnerving ways to startle or generate suspense.
However, the movie’s character-switching chapter structure ultimately becomes a way to tie up loose ends. Rather than exploring his characters’ subjectivity or diving into their unique psychology, Cregger opts to use their perspective merely to reorient us in the story.
This doesn’t detract from the movie’s effectiveness as a horror thriller, but it did make me wish there was more here. It introduces us to a powder keg of a situation— of a Pennsylvania town ready to tear itself apart over these disappearances, of the limits of modern surveillance in the face of good old-fashioned black magic— and opts for a narrative puzzle box rather than plumbing more interesting psychological or societal depths.
Highest 2 Lowest
Spike Lee’s riff on Akira Kurosawa’s classic kidnapping procedural High & Low is a characteristically bold swing with intermittently thrilling payoffs.
Highest 2 Lowest, unsurprisingly, is a New York film through and through. Where Kurosawa surveyed class divides amid a landscape of buttoned-up Japanese businessmen and immaculately suspenseful, close-quarters negotiations, Lee lets loose. His movie, for better and worse, changes tones and locations on a whim.
It centers on a music mogul, David King (Denzel Washington), who finds his fortune and reputation on the line when he’s targeted by a ransom plot. The catch? The kidnapper, thinking he was nabbing King’s son, picks up his chauffeur Paul’s kid instead.
The first hour or so of this film was a painful jumble of messy character development, mismatched tonal shifts, and a distractingly overdone score. Perhaps the thing that threw me off the most, though, was its bewilderingly stale performances.
Save for Washington and Jeffrey Wright, who plays Paul, the acting here is almost uniformly bad. This matters less in the second half, where Lee finds his footing and crafts a banger of a set piece revolving around a money exchange. He transposes the same train-set sequence from Kurosawa’s film onto the New York Subway, while also infusing a Puerto Rican heritage celebration and moped-riding criminals. Here, and for the rest of the movie, things click thrillingly into place, and the elements that hurt it in the beginning matter less and less.
Like this subway sequence, the big departures that Lee makes from the original are bold and often exhilarating. There are startling depictions of the different ways police treat King, a wealthy businessman, and Paul, his lower-class driver with a criminal past. Whereas Kurosawa’s film leaned heavily into the police procedural mold, Lee breaks free from it. Out of necessity, his characters eventually take matters into their own hands.
The most interesting aspect of this movie to me, though, was its parallels to filmmaking. In trying to buy back a controlling stake of his music label, King is attempting to ensure his reputation isn’t diluted. Lee’s depiction of this, and the movie’s unnervingly pleasant final scene, offer a complicated view of art and commerce, and of how family legacy can warp it.