Producers: Basil Iwanyk, Gillian Berrie, David Mackenzie and Teddy Schwarzman   Director: David Mackenzie   Screenplay: Justin Piasecki   Cast: Riz Ahmed, Lily James, Sam Worthington, Willa Fitzgerald, Jared Abrahamson, Pun Bandhu, Eisa Davis, Matthew Maher, Seth Barrish, Victor Garber, Jamil Haque and Jamie Ann Burke   Distributor: Bleecker Street

Grade: B

It’s fixer versus fixer in this cerebral new action flick from first-time feature writer Justin Piasecki and director David Mackenzie (“Hell or High Water”).  “Relay” calls to mind memorable paranoid thrillers of the seventies like “The Conversation,” “Three Days of the Condor” and “The Parallax View,” and while it gets a mite too clever for its own good down the home stretch, overall it’s an intelligent cinematic puzzle that generally plays fair with the audience.

Driving its pulse rate is intense, febrile Riz Ahmed, who’s Ash, a former broker who turned to drink in despair over the unscrupulous financial dealings he’d accommodated himself to and is now a recovering alcoholic.  He supports himself by helping would-be whistleblowers who are having second thoughts about putting their lives on the line to return whatever incriminating documents they possess to their old employers for a cash payment and future security.  As the film opens, he’s shown overseeing the rigid protocol he’s arranged for a nervous man named Hoffman (Matthew Maher) turn over such material to the head of a pharmaceutical company (Victor Garber) and then seeing the fellow off to a new life.

Shortly afterward Sarah Grant (Lily James) is referred to him by a lawyer (Seth Barrish) she’s consulted in hopes of returning to the biotech firm from which she was recently dismissed internal test results documenting potentially harmful effects from genetically modified grain the company plans to promote.  Now finding herself under surveillance by the firm, she’s reconsidered her intention to become a whistleblower and needs assistance in safely returning the data.

Ash responds to her through his usual means—a telephone relay firm, usually employed by those with speech or hearing problems, that allows one to converse using a keyboard rather than viva voce, and that immediately deletes the conversation with no trail that could allow it to be traced.  He agrees to take her case, but instructs her on the elaborate procedures she must follow to insure that he can never be identified—and that by using the postal system and other means, they can always stay a step ahead of the surveillance team, manned by Dawson (Sam Worthington) with his confederates Rosetti (Willa Fitzgerald) and Ryan (Jared Abrahamson), the company has assigned to follow her every move.

One gets a kick out of watching as Ash, a sort of super-controlled one-man army, outfoxes the surveillance team over and over again, particularly through the employment of the relay system; although watching him typing out messages to be transmitted to Sarah by the firm’s team of stone-faced operators could get tiresome, Mackenzie, working with cinematographer Giles Nuttgens, production designer Jane Musky and editor Matt Mayer, keeps the process from becoming tedious.  Adding to the tension is the fact that as the days pass and their interaction grows increasingly complex, Ash and Sarah develop a bond in which she becomes interested in him as a person and he becomes more and more protective of her, setting aside the nothing-but-business attitude he’s always maintained to protect himself.

And when Sarah makes a mistake in following his instructions, he has to decide whether to violate his usual strict procedures by stepping aside when the pursuers get close.  The choice he makes will put both of them in peril and lead to a sequence at a crowded concert hall where a piano trio is performing Schubert—a well-choreographed episode that might remind you of the ones Hitchcock memorably staged in such venues.  But that’s not the end: there’s a twist you probably won’t be expecting, an abduction and a chase—all things that explain why Ash chose as his AA sponsor a cop named Wash (Eisa Davis), whose presence proves invaluable in explaining a denouement right out of the “Condor” playbook (though it requires you to set aside an observation about media revelations of corporate skullduggery that Dawson has quite reasonably argued).

In fact, the plot of “Relay” requires you to overlook a lot of implausibility, in particular how each turn is based on accurate predictions about how the other side will respond to every pre-plotted tactic.  But that’s the nature of the genre: in retrospect you might be prompted to scrutinize each step along the way and decide that the whole intricate contraption is just too convenient to swallow.

As things are unfolding, however, you’re unlikely to be bothered by this, especially since Ahmed brings such quiet ferocity to Ash that he carries the film over any rough spots.  James is fine but unexceptional, while Worthington makes a hissable villain.  So does Garber, who in a very brief role is the very model of the detestable corporate bad-guy.  The use of NYC locations, shot in tones of gloomy menace by Nuttgens, is a definite plus, with an exciting Times Square sequence once again calling Hitchcock to mind.  Tony Doogan’s score is broodingly melancholic except when called on to pump up the action.

“Relay” adds enough inventive touches to an old template to bring the vintage paranoid thriller to life again, if not to make for an instant classic.  

Producers: Todd Black and Jason Michael Berman   Director: Spike Lee   Screenplay: Alan Fox   Cast: Denzel Washington, Jeffrey Wright, Ilfenesh Hadera, A$AP Rocky, Aubrey Joseph, Dean Winters, LaChanze, John Douglas Thompson, Michael Potts, Isis “Ice Spice” Gaston, Elijah Wright, Frederick Weller, Wendell Pierce, Nick Turturro, Rick Fox, Rod Strickland, Eddie Palmieri and Aiyana-Lee   Distributor: A24/Apple+ 

Grade: B

A closing caption makes clear that “Highest 2 Lowest” is a homage to Akira Kurosawa, but just as that great director radically altered its source, Ed McBain’s (i.e., Evan Hunter’s) 1959 novel “King’s Ransom,” to fit its new Japanese setting in “High and Low” (1963), Spike Lee reimagines Kurosawa’s film not just by modernizing and refashioning the plot to make it his own, but by returning it to its New York City roots.  (McBain’s 87^th Precinct was located in the fictional Isola, of course, but everyone knew it was really NYC.)

The film’s opening credits are set against swooning, wide-screen shots of the Big Apple’s skyline, set to the soaring strains of “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning!” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma.”  Matthew Libatique’s luxuriating widescreen lens finally settles on a multi-level, terraced skyscraper set high atop a hill in Brooklyn’s trendy Dumbo neighborhood, finally focusing on a patio where David King (Denzel Washington), a music mogul, is exuberantly explaining his plans into a telephone.  He’s secretly arranging funding to buy back Stackin’ Hits, the record label he founded back in the day, which had been sold some years before to a conglomerate he believes is now planning to betray its cultural roots by selling off its catalogue and destroying its identity.  The scheme requires putting everything he owns—reflected in the sumptuousness of his apartment and office as fashioned by production designer Mark Friedberg and the elegant costumes of Francine Jamison-Tanchuck—on the line with creditors, but he’s imbued with renewed energy at the idea, even if his wife Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera) is taken aback at the thought of putting their lifestyle at risk for his dream of preserving his legacy—and adding to it.

One person David trusts implicitly is Paul Christopher (Jeffrey Wright), the friend he grew up with in a rough neighborhood and hired as his driver after Paul’s stint “upstate.”  Their bond is further cemented in the next generation: Trey King (Aubrey Joseph) is the best buddy of Kyle Christopher (Elijah Wright), who’s also King’s godson, and the two are attending a basketball clinic together.  When Trey’s sidelined with an ankle twist, the two boys slip out of the training unobserved except by a kidnapper.  David soon receives a call saying that Trey is being held for ransom, and immediately decides to use the money he’s collected to buy back his label for the ransom, even though his loan agreements preclude his using the money for any undesignated purpose.  Then Trey shows up unharmed; the kidnapper has instead snatched Kyle, whom he’d mistaken for Trey because he was wearing Trey’s distinctive headband.  By then a bevy of cops have arrived, led by Detectives Bridges (John Douglas Thompson), Bell (LaChanze) and Higgins (Dean Winters), to take charge.  And David is confronted with a moral question: will he be willing to put his fortune, and perhaps his freedom, on the line to rescue his friend’s son rather than his own?

Thus far Alan Fox’s script has hewn fairly closely to the plot established by McBain and Kurosawa, but from this point Lee’s film diverges in important respects.  The earlier works become police procedurals in which the protagonist’s ethical quandary, while hardly forgotten, becomes secondary to the elaborate steps the authorities devise to try to identify and capture the kidnapper.  Fox and Lee don’t ignore their predecessors—indeed, the spectacular sequence they mount to depict how the effort to subvert the successful transfer of the cash, involving a subway ride crammed with Yankee fans led by a manic Nick Turturro, a street celebration where Eddie Palmieri is performing with his band, and a constellation of motorcycles passing the loot from one rider to another, is a far more complex version of the commuter train episode in Kurosawa’s film.  (And not just more complex, but more confused topographically, though viscerally exciting as shot by Libatique and edited by Barry Alexander Brown and Allyson C. Johnson, with further punch added by Howard Drossin’s score, which here abandons the lush, overripe tone it exudes elsewhere to opt for energy over voluptuousness.)

But in tracking down the kidnapper, it’s King and Paul who do the heavy lifting, with the police relegated to the background after the failure of their subway strategy.  And it’s King’s fabled musical ear and Paul’s street contacts, not dogged police work, that lead to the identification of the kidnapper (A$AP Rocky).  Curiously, when it comes to the impact of the incident on King’s career, endangered by betrayals and legal quibbles, Lee opts for something less cynical than Kurosawa’s denouement though no less a triumph of ideals, encapsulated in a coda spotlighting Ayana-Lee as a singer whose audition proves that King’s ear remains undiminished. 

But the motive behind the crime remains much the same, and Kurosawa’s confrontation-through-a-glass-barrier confrontation between perpetrator and victim is mirrored by Lee not once but twice, first with a clever rap twist and then with a critique of the inexplicable crudity of modern media frenzy.  (He fails, however, to come up with a counterpart to the Japanese director’s hallucinatory sequence set in the haze of a drug demi-monde, though King’s descent into the kidnapper’s subterranean world is presumably meant to fulfill that role.)  Lee also lightens things occasionally with in-jokes and some strategically-placed cameos by the likes of Rosie Perez and Anthony Ramos.

Throughout the focus is on Washington, who responds with a protean performance that powerfully captures King’s radical emotional swerves.  Wright’s turn as a widower infused with religious fervor who tries to navigate a way between loyalty to his friend and devotion to his son is less showy but nicely detailed, and A$AP Rocky contributes an unnervingly accurate portrait of a young man driven by anger and desperation.  Among the others Winters is most notable as a cop whose prejudices aren’t well hidden and whose volatility over failure reflect what is probably Lee’s attitude toward the force as a whole.

Despite the switch to superlatives in the title, Lee’s film doesn’t eclipse its more modest model, but it’s a smooth, engrossing—and personal—rethinking of McBain’s rock-solid premise.