So, in the three weeks leading up to The Oscars, it’s time to look at the Best (American) Movies of 2025. As usual, I’ll start with what I didn’t see: I saw eight of the Oscar nominees, but I didn’t see Bugonia (violence against women) or Secret Agent (I can’t take movies about fascism right now. And anyway, it’s not American.). I hear they’re both great. I also intended to see but never got around to Is This Thing On?, Nouvelle Vague, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, The Mastermind and Black Bag, among others.
Now, also as usual, we’ll spend the first week looking at things that are Not on The List.
Not on the 2025 List: Highest 2 Lowest
I’ve written about Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low as an underrated movie, though that was a bit of a stretch, as it’s fairly well known and highly regarded. I just wanted to write about it at the time.
It’s the story of a millionaire who gets a call that his son has been kidnapped, only to discover that they actually kidnapped his chauffeur’s son instead, but they demand the money anyway. In the second half, the police get involved and catch the kidnappers.
I loved that movie so much that I tracked down the American police procedural book it adapted (“King’s Ransom” by Ed McBain, one of the “87th Precinct” series) and I loved that so much that I then read most of the 55 books in McBain’s series. I then recommended one for adaptation in the short-lived column I wrote for Scriptshadow.
Finally, in preparation for watching this movie, I decided to check out the first adaptation of “King’s Ransom,” which was an episode of the short-lived “87th Precinct” TV show in 1961. (Nancy Reagan plays the millionaire’s wife!) So now I’ve read the book twice, seen the TV adaptation once, and seen the Japanese adaptation many times. I’m ready to see, finally, the first American feature adaptation of this very American book.
This movie was completely ignored by the Academy, which is understandable, because it has serious script problems, but it’s very well directed by Lee and I would have liked to see him get a nod.
The big problem with this movie is the era in which it was made. Cops are out of fashion. So this is an anti-cop movie. But how do you adapt an Ed McBain book and not have cops as the heroes??
The solution is to have Denzel Washington as David King realize the cops are not going to solve the case, and go out and solve it himself instead. Well, that doesn’t work.
But here’s the thing: I think there’s a way that could have worked. And the movie almost got there.
There’s a rich tradition of movies where a civilian realizes that he can’t rely on the cops and has to solve this himself. But it’s always tricky to pull off. The hero needs a lot of motivation to make that choice.
In this movie, unlike all previous versions, the chauffeur has a criminal record, and I like that change. This naturally causes the cops to wonder if he’s concocted this whole scheme himself to bilk his employer/friend out of millions of dollars. That’s a good wrinkle to add to the story.
But that never pays off. They never arrest the chauffeur. In the movie, Denzel finds a good lead, but the cops are uninterested for no good reason, so Denzel picks up a gun and goes off to do it himself. If they had confidently arrested the chauffeur, then it would be much more believable that they would be totally uninterested in new leads, and it would have genuinely felt like it was all up to Denzel now.
Or just let the cops be the heroes again.
(Of course, you would still have the problem that it’s ridiculous that 70 year old Denzel could beat up 36 year old ASAP Rocky, but that could just be rewritten to involve a gun instead of fists.)
Anyway, it’s still a well-directed movie and worth checking out, but this fundamental script problem basically wrecks it.
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