a$ap rocky

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025)

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A little over ten years ago, I went to the beach with a friend and their family. Their older brother had two children at the time: a baby and a toddler, the latter of whom was just starting to express herself in fun and interesting ways. It was her first time at the beach, and she grew frustrated with the ceaselessness of the waves as they knocked her down while she tried to remain upright, at one point turning to the water and saying “Stop!” This caused the girl’s father to chuckle, saying, “The ocean’s not going to stop, baby.” The imagery of waves and water is everywhere in Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, from the instigating factor of the plot being a flood in therapist Linda (Rose Byrne)’s apartment, prompting her to move herself and her daughter to move into a seaside motel, to at least one Hokusai print appearing on Linda’s wall, and a midcentury modern wave-shaped lamp standing behind Linda late in the film, as if threatening to overtake her. Later in the film, one of her patients, a woman named Caroline (Daniel Macdonald) who abandoned her baby in Linda’s office, sprints off along the beach; it’s unclear if Caroline is planning to end her own life or if she’s just continuing to run from her problems, but the action does seem to inspire Linda to at least consider releasing herself from her mortal coil and letting the sea take her. After all, the waves are never going to stop. 

The tides that batter Linda for most of the film are largely metaphorical. Linda’s daughter is afflicted with some kind of illness that makes her extremely averse to consuming food, and her dietary intake is supplemented by a subcutaneous feeding tube on which Linda believes the girl has become overreliant. The pediatrician overseeing the daughter’s care needs the girl to hit a certain milestone weight by a specific date in order for discussions about removing the feeding tube, and when the two butt heads over treatment the doctor is less than sympathetic as Linda has been missing important group sessions. Linda’s already drowning in all of this as her husband is away for months at a time, and he drastically underestimates the extent to which being the sole caretaker for their chronically ill daughter while also maintaining her own psychiatry practice is absolutely drowning Linda, even before she’s forced to move into a motel. She’s feuding with her daughter’s doctor, she’s fighting with the parking attendant at the clinic, and once she gets to the motel, there’s immediate beef between her and an unsympathetic Gen-Z clerk (Ivy Wolk) who trolls her for seemingly no reason. It’s here that she also meets James (A$AP Rocky), the motel’s superintendent, who is the only person in her life who seems willing to cut her a break, even if Linda has been so engulfed by an endless odyssey of conflict and misery that she’s too prickly to accept his overtures of friendship. 

James is the only man in this movie who isn’t awful. We spend some time in a few of Linda’s own sessions with her therapist (Conan O’Brien), and although it’s clear that she’s exceeded some important clinical boundaries—notably, it’s an utterly bizarre choice to select one of your office colleagues as your clinician—he’s clearly completely checked out and offers little to no support despite his willingness to accept her money. Disinterested as he may be, he’s a mirror for Linda in relationship to one of her own patients (Lurker’s Daniel Zolghardi), who is clearly sexually and romantically fixated on her; he communicates his desires for her, “I dreamed that you and I kissed,” in almost the exact same way that she floats her own inappropriate affection for her therapist to him, couching it in a story about how she dreamt about the two of them. It’s these two characters and the aforementioned parking lot attendant who appear on screen, but some of the most revealing characters are the ones who exist solely or primarily as disembodied voices. 

We watch as Linda struggles with trying to compel her landlord to get his shit together and repair the hole in her ceiling, a job that ends up being much less time-consuming than expected once things finally start moving, the landlord offering excuses over the phone. Another phone-only character is the husband of Caroline; when Linda calls him as Caroline’s emergency contact when the baby is intentionally left in her office while Caroline escapes, he’s confrontational in a way that’s clearly born not out of concern for his wife or child and purely about the fact that he’s having to deal with the situation at all, stating over and over again “I am at work.” This echoes through to Linda’s husband, who is an off-screen presence for most of the film’s runtime. He checks in only periodically to obliviously sling more guilt at his wife in an escalated tone; her exhaustion is his exasperation. He ineffectively attempts to micromanage the wrong things from afar when what Linda needs is actual assistance and support in the here and now. When he finally appears on screen at the end, he manages to pin up all of the loose ends that Linda couldn’t rather efficiently, especially in regards to getting the hole in their apartment’s ceiling repaired. In that moment, I personally felt the wave of anxiety forsaging the inevitable conversation of See, now was that so hard? and You really needed me to do all of this for you? that Linda would be subjected to. Her husband actually being present for a single day managed to help get things back on track would be proof not that what she needed was actual support but proof that she was just not trying hard enough, when in fact she is worked to the bone. 

Beyond the discussion of the metaphorical (and potentially literal) engulfment that Linda endures, this is a fantastically shot film. We are never more than a few feet from Byrne for the entire film, sometimes swaying back and forth with her as she totters about, as if we’re on these late night pot-smoking escapades with her (she smokes copiously). The movement of the camera itself is part of the feeling of this headlong rush into wave after wave of setbacks. That commitment to verisimilitude doesn’t stop the film from leaning into some slight potential magical realism as Linda occasionally perceives something metaphysical happening within and around the hole in her ceiling when she checks in on the (lack of) progress. Much of this is left up to individual interpretation, of course; there’s a single moment in which Linda raises her hand to touch some motes of dust or light and asks, softly, “Mom?”, and that alone is something that everyone in the audience is going to interpret differently. There are other great framing choices that are made about what we are allowed to see and what’s kept out of the camera’s field of vision, beyond just the choice to make several characters angry men on the phone. The most notable of these is that Linda’s daughter’s face is concealed from the camera, existing as kicking feet in a carseat or hands that crumble toast so that it never reaches her mouth. It’s an interesting choice, and one I look forward to hearing different interpretations of in the discourse to come. 

Byrne is absolutely stellar here, and it’s not to be missed. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

2 Highest 2 Lowest

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Over the past few months, I have consistently watched one to two classic episodes of Law & Order every night around dinner time. The ritual started as a fascination with the high cinematic quality of the show’s early seasons, especially in contributions from all-star cinematographer Ernest Dickerson and maniacally intense screen actor Michael Moriarty. Now that I’m about five seasons deep into the show, though, both of those notable names have departed, and I can no longer tell if I’m impressed with the craft anymore or if I’m just addicted to the storytelling format. There’s a hypnotic satisfaction to the show’s procedural narrative rhythms that soothes something deep in my otherwise anxious brain. It’s so hypnotizing, in fact, that every movie I watch just reads as different flavors of Law & Order now. The last time I went to a repertory screening was to see the grimy 80s crime thriller Night of the Juggler, which just played as an especially trashy episode of vintage Law & Order (with extended chase scenes that would’ve blown the show’s weekly budget). This week, I got to see a double feature of films by Akira Kurosawa and Spike Lee at The Prytania, and I still could only interpret them as variations of Law & Order. 1963’s High and Low? That’s classy Law & Order. Its new straight-to-AppleTV+ remake? That’s Law & Order as early-aughts melodrama, with some occasional twerking in the courthouse. Everything is Law & Order for those with eyes to see (and access to a family member’s Hulu log-in).

I would like to extend myself some grace for mentioning my new Law & Order habit in yet another classic movie review, since High and Low and Night of the Juggler share a similar first-act premise that invites the reference. Both films start with a crazed criminal kidnapping the child of a wealthy businessman they envy & loathe, only to discover that they have abducted the wrong kid by mistake, complicating their chances of collecting the demanded ransom. While Night of the Juggler uses that premise to launch into a Death Wish-style campaign of brute-force vengeance against the scurrying sickos of NYC, High and Low is much more thoughtful & introspective about the wealth disparity issues of Yokohama, Japan. Longtime Kurosawa muse Toshiro Mifune stars as an executive at a ladies’ shoe manufacturer who’s in the middle of a complex negotiation to take over the company when he’s informed by telephone that his son has been kidnapped. Only, his servile chauffer’s son has been abducted by mistake, which corners Mifune’s hard-edged business prick into a tough moral quandary: whether to use his life’s savings to fund the purchase of his business or to fund the return of an innocent child whose father cannot afford the outrageous ransom demands otherwise. While he struggles to make his choice, his wife, his grieving chauffer, and the detectives assigned to the case look on in horror, amazed that he would consider for a second to choose shoes over the life of a child. He eventually relents.

Like all great Law & Order episodes, High and Low really gets cooking in its second half, after the crime has been fully defined and all that’s left to do is exact punishment. It’s not only satisfying to watch detectives zero in on a prime suspect by listening for evidence of specific streetcar rattles in his recorded phone calls or by staging stake-outs to catch him purchasing heroin in an American GI jazz bar, but the way the investigation’s success is dependent on how public sentiment plays out in the press adds another layer of tension to the on-the-ground drama. As the walls close in around the working-class maniac who takes a wild shot at a corporate goon above his station by fucking with his family, the “high” and “low” signifiers of the title become increasingly literal, recalling the geographically “upper” & “lower” class distinctions of Parasite. The businessman’s invaded home is revealed to be perched at the top of an otherwise economically dire neighborhood, a symbol of financial superiority that visibly mocks the struggling workers below. As cruel as the kidnapper is for threatening the life of a child (and murdering his accomplices with overdoses of pure heroin) while rocking ice-cold mirrored sunglasses, the source of his resentment is vivid, and the businessman’s innocence in their clash is proven to be a matter of law, not of morality. The Law & Order connections also become unignorable in the back half once the detectives start interviewing the kidnapper’s neighbors for clues while they continue to work their manual-labor jobs at fish markets, junk yards, and bus depots. All that’s missing is the show’s iconic reverberated gavel-banging sound effect to punctuate each change in locale.

I wish I could say I got as much out of Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest as I got out of the Kurosawa film. His modernization of the classic crime picture is one of those conceptually baffling remakes that only invites you to question its changes to the source material instead of engaging with it as a standalone work. Lee casts Denzel Washington (one of the few working actors who could credibly be said to be on Mifune’s skill level) as a record company executive instead of the more logical hip-hop version of the original character: a sports sneaker magnate. Instead of mistakenly kidnapping the son of an anonymous employee, a disgruntled rapper who couldn’t earn his way on to the exec’s label (A$AP Rocky, holding his own against Washington’s trademark intensity) kidnaps the exec’s godson, as the chauffer in this version is a close family friend (the always-welcome Jeffrey Wright). That major change to the central dynamic weakens the tension of the businessman’s moral dilemma, but Lee makes other changes elsewhere that feel more thoughtful & pointed. At the very least, the update from tracking public sentiment in the press to tracking public sentiment in social media memes helps make it apparent why Lee might have thought to remake High and Low in the first place (even if it appears that he hasn’t seen a meme in at least fifteen years). Likewise, when the record exec and his chauffer decide to seek vigilante justice outside of the official, sluggish detectives’ investigation, it opens the movie up to broader social commentary about how true justice is achieved. There’s also some interesting visual play in how Lee relocates the final showdown between businessman & kidnaper on either side of a plexiglass barrier from prison to recording booth, but then he stages that same showdown a second time in a prison cell anyway, so the point of the exercise starts to muddle.

Questioning Spike Lee’s every minor decision does not stop at how Highest 2 Lowest relates to its source material. It’s constant. The movie opens with the worst Broadway showtune I’ve ever heard in my life, with its title populating onscreen in a childlish Toy Story font. The first half of the story, before the kidnapping victim is returned, is scored by an oppressive strings arrangement that makes every familial heart-to-heart play like TV movie melodrama instead of a big-screen thriller from a major auteur. The whole thing reads as laughably phony, especially by the time Washington has one of those melodramatic heart-to-hearts in his teenage son’s bedroom, which is decorated with a Kamala Harris campaign poster. Again, baffling. At the same time, Lee does occasionally convey total awareness of how he’s trolling his audience, pairing Jeffrey Wright’s casting with a full art-gallery collection of Basquiat paintings, drawing attention to his casting of Allstate TV commercial spokesman Dean Winters by nicknaming one of Wright’s handguns “Mayhem”, and having Washington erroneously refer to Law & Order: “SUV” like a true out-of-touch millionaire. The most generous reading of these small, playful touches could link them to Kurosawa’s own jokey details, like staging his kidnapping during a child’s game of Sherriff & Bandit or delegating the police-artist suspect sketches to a child who can barely fingerpaint. Personally, I don’t find any comparisons between the two films to be especially flattering to Lee. He seems to be having fun in Highest 2 Lowest, and I suppose it’s overall worth seeing for his trademark fleeting moments of brilliance, but its lows are much lower than its highs are high. It resembles the modern, corny version of Law & Order I had assumed the show had always been, whereas Kurosawa’s High and Low recalls the classic, refined version I never knew existed until this summer (which is somewhat ironic given Lee’s professional connection to vintage Law & Order cinematographer Ernest Dickerson).

-Brandon Ledet