CHICAGO — The 1959 Ed McBain crime novel “King’s Ransom” has crossed the Pacific Ocean twice now, and its latest screen incarnation, “Highest 2 Lowest,” makes for a disarming hand-off from the stern gravity of Akira Kurosawa to the exuberant restlessness of Spike Lee.

It’s also serious where it counts — in its reminder that cheapening a product, the thing you make, helps a bottom line only so long. In the McBain novel as well as the 1963 Kurosawa drama “High and Low,” the protagonist’s business was shoes. In “Highest 2 Lowest,” Lee and debut feature screenwriter Alan Fox trade footwear for music, with Denzel Washington as a celebrated record label executive facing a kidnapping crisis, a scramble to hang onto everything he’s worked for and a battle for his own soul.

Some of that is handle

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