Ah, man, Spike Lee is back on his hip-hop conservative shit. He’s been tinkering with this messaging on and off since damn near the start of the century, when his criticism of the genre shifted from the power-holding executives (both white and Black) of the music industry who were profiting off buffoonery, a la Bamboozled, to rap music itself. “I’ve always felt you can feel the progress of African Americans by listening to their music,” Spike said more than two decades ago during a speech at Brown University. “Some of this ‘gangsta rap’ stuff, it’s not doing anybody any good. This stuff is really dangerous.”

But I had thought he got it out of his system a decade ago with Chi-Raq, a reaction of sorts to the rise of Chicago drill that seems only to have a surface-level curiosity about the music. (Remember when King Louie responded with “Fuck Spike Lee”? I always like when a rapper disses a non-rapper, most preferably crooked mayors and underperforming NBA players.) Though, to Spike’s credit, the musical satire, based on the Lysistrata, is still incredibly entertaining because it’s so over-the-top in its preachiness. Unafraid of putting his imperfect and contradictory views on Chicago gang violence on screen, Spike’s absurd combination of a lean-sipping Nick Cannon doing drill karaoke, countless fourth-wall-breaking Samuel L. Jackson monologues, and a community sent into disarray by a sex strike, is undeniably full of passion and imagination, even if you’re unconvinced of his point. It’s the exact kind of stuff you can find only in a Spike Lee joint, and why his movies have been steamrolling backlash with style for 40 years.

That isn’t the case with Highest 2 Lowest, Spike Lee’s remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 noiristic masterwork, High and Low. It takes place in a world shaped by modern hip-hop, but still looks down on the genre with the satirical wit and nuance of the comment section under a Sexyy Red snippet. The new movie’s premise is that Denzel Washington—reunited with Spike Lee for the first time since their banger 2006 heist film Inside Man—stars as David King, a Bronx-born music mogul who is the longtime boss of Stackin’ Hits records, a Def Jam–like label that isn’t as poppin’ as it used to be. His business partner, Patrick (Michael Potts), wants to sell, but David fears that, if he goes through with that, his life will lose meaning, so he comes up with a plan to buy out Patrick to veto the sale. It’s part thriller and part David going through an existential crisis about making art in a world that doesn’t prioritize art how it used to, finding purpose beyond money, and the generational divide.

At home (an extravagant Dumbo penthouse overlooking both the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges), David’s wife, Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera), points out that he doesn’t get the joy from music that he once did and his decision to stay in a failing business is strictly to stroke his massive ego. Of course, David ignores Pam’s concerns and prepares to get the money anyway, but, just as that’s happening his teenage son, Trey (Aubrey Joseph), who hilariously wears head-to-toe Amiri and has a Kamala Harris poster on his bedroom wall (the sort of kid who exists only in Spike Lee movies) is kidnapped from his basketball summer camp.

The kidnapper is played by A$AP Rocky, who has somehow turned Testing into a lifetime headliner slot at Rolling Loud and a legitimate acting career. He demands David pay him $17.5 million in Swiss Francs—an amount so steep that David will be unable to buy his partner out and stay in the music business—or else he’ll kill his son. This is when there’s a bit of a curveball: The kidnapper nabbed the wrong kid, someone named Kyle whose dad is David’s driver and friend. The crook still wants David to pay up, though, so he has to decide if he’s really willing to give up his dream for a boy who isn’t his own. None of this is as tense as it may sound.

And Denzel is having a good-ass time. Always the coolest guy in the room—rocking a diamond earring and waves, with the walls of his home office lined with images of stars of like Nas, Hendrix, Ali, and Jordan—with jokes for everyone and a hubristic streak that makes me think of his dishonest police chief in Carl Franklin’s heater Out of Time. “You got the chicken?” screams Rocky over the phone. Denzel fires back “How you want it? Baked, fried, or jerk?” dialogue only he could pull off. And, when Spike hits the streets of New York, he still captures the life of the city just as well as anyone. There’s a sequence on a packed 4 train the day of a Yankees–Red Sox game with some 25th Hour energy and a ridiculous Sergio Leone–style stand-off on a subway platform. In one moment, there’s a close-up on a still image of Yankees stud Aaron Judge that is basically erotic.

Those Spikeisms make Highest 2 Lowest watchable and occasionally fun, but, as the movie becomes more and more of a critique about hip-hop, it feels oddly toothless for Spike. We learn that Rocky’s kidnapper is a vulgar, attention-thirsty struggling Bronx drill–ish rapper named Yung Felon. He wanted all of his life to be discovered by David, a goal that has turned into an obsession. When Yung Felon’s identity is revealed, his music blows up with billions of streams, and new fans flock to support him despite his heinous crimes. He celebrates in a mildly surreal musical sequence that finds him rapping one of his hits in front of twerking BBL asses.

Sure, there’s some truth in Spike’s read of the current hip-hop landscape—the jail, or even death, to rap star pipeline is real; every week on Instagram there’s a new set of characters desperately chasing virality; and there are rappers being used to push right-wing propaganda—but his depiction of Yung Felon is lazy and not an absurd enough parody. If you’re going to skewer the genre, roast the fuck out of it! Call it a CIA psyop! Call it a community poison! Well, anything is better than Spike just parrotting the kind of “hip-hop today is all pussy-rap and gun-talk” messaging that every uncle rants about after seeing a couple of Say Cheese and Akademiks posts on his Instagram feed. What a bore!

In the 1980s and 1990s, when Spike’s complicated love of hip-hop pulsed through so many of his best movies, he used the genre as a way to humanize his characters, to reflect the angst of these young—often tragic—Black fuck-ups who had to fight police abuse, racism, and white fragility and exploitation just to survive. It was in the way Radio Raheem rolled around defiantly in Do the Right Thing with Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” blasting out of his boombox. It was in the way Mekhi Phifer posted up in the middle of the project yard in the opening scene of Clockers, soundtracked by the Premo-produced “Return of the Crooklyn Dodgers.” It was even in his militant and swaggy depiction of Malcolm X. He sympathized with the suffering of the characters in these movies and maybe even felt like if things went a little bit differently for him, he could have been them.

Spike has no sympathy for Yung Felon. He barely portrays him as a real human, just a scary microcosm of a generation that, with their brains fried by the attention economy of the internet and a hip-hop culture that has lost its way, is unrecognizable to him. Their plight is their own damn fault, he suggests. The one who gets to be redeemed is David, the aging executive, while Yung Felon is a lost cause. I get it: Spike Lee is 68 years old and has been rich for longer than I’ve been alive. He probably doesn’t have much in common with the majority of Black people under 35 years old and might not even interact with any who aren’t blood relatives or professional athletes. He is more David than Raheem. He is the old head. That doesn’t mean we should give him a pass for Highest 2 Lowest feeling as afraid and unforgiving of the complexities of Black youth culture as an op-ed in the New York Post.