Highest 2 Lowest
First screened and reviewed in August 2025
Director: Spike Lee. Cast: Denzel Washington, Ilfenesh Hadera, Aubrey Joseph, Jeffrey Wright, Elijah Wright, Michael Potts, John Douglas Thompson, LaChanze, Dean Winters, A$AP Rocky, Frederick Weller, Wendell Pierce, Ice Spice, Princess Nokia, Aiyana-Lee Anderson, Rick Fox, Nicholas Turturro, Rosie Perez, Anthony Ramos, Eddie Palmieri. Screenplay: Alan Fox (based on the novel King's Ransom by Ed McBain and the 1963 film High and Low, directed by Akira Kurosawa and written by Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, Ryūzō Kikushima, and Eijirō Hisaita). In Brief:
Starts 2 low, but ends impressively high. Cranks into fuller gear at a palpable juncture and poses rich questions.
VOR:⑤
Valuable in what it achieves and what it half-successfully attempts: vis-à-vis Lee, Kurosawa, Washington, current film, and contemporary life.
(What follows is not quite spoilery, but I do say more than I'd have wanted to know going in.)
Should it have been called Lowest 2 Highest? I'd been led to expect that the opening hour of Spike Lee's latest was a kind of dropped first set but that I should trust the director to rally like the Grand Slam legend that he is and pull off the match in a barnstorming back half. (I know that tennis isn't Spike's sport.)
That's even truer than I'd guessed: Lowest Lows 2 Highest Highs. I'll start with the bad news. While the movie is perfectly watchable even at its weakest, there is no question that the first hour is ugly as fuck, in the way movies financed by streaming services routinely are. The meant-to-be-rousing flyover prologue of various New York skylines is overbright and garishly colored, and both the interior and exterior shots of music mogul David King's penthouse apartment, predominant in the movie's first act, are even more so. I felt frustrated by Lee and by returning d.p. Matthew Libatique through this passage and for a good long while, but also frustrated for them, persisting as they do in a digitized, under-textured art form that's increasingly not the same medium they started out in, or that I got hooked on at a young age. I also got frustrated with Lee that, despite giving David's wife Pam an early, spirited speech about "no longer staying silent"—pledging a substantial characterization to follow, and perhaps gently rebuking her quieter, sidelined corollary in Kurosawa's High and Low—it's fairly evident early on that Pam will be peripheral to the action in Highest 2 Lowest. Worse, and with all due respect, Ilfenesh Hadera does not seem at all ready to hold her own in two-hander scenes with a hungry, swaggering, inventive Denzel Washington, and neither she nor Lee have a clear or coherent perspective on her character... an all-too-familiar sexist imbalance across Lee's work, extending to many of his best films.
The far bigger surprise is that some of the plot beats you expect to pull Highest 2 Lowest into focus and to furnish some needed tension seem barely directed at all. As lit, as framed, as cut together, and as acted, the moment where David gets the phone call announcing the abduction of his teenage son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) might almost be called disheveled, as if some shots are missing. I'm all for avoiding the perpetual scene of parents wailing and clutching their chests, but neither David nor Pam nor Washington nor Hadera seem like they're experiencing any of the circumstances that the scene is assigning. I didn't know what he was playing, and I didn't buy how she was playing what she was playing. Compounding the problem, Kurosawa fans will know why David's chauffeur Paul (Jeffrey Wright) has a vested and quickly deepening interest in this turn of events, and here too, the filmmaking seemed to actively obfuscate Paul's standpoint and thought process in a sequence to which he only seems like a satellite.
Having just watched High and Low for the first time yesterday, I was so eager to see Lee tackle this material. In era, in locale, and in updated music-industry idiom, Highest 2 Lowest seemed like an inspired project for this artist. But here I was, witnessing what felt like a detached exercise in rushed or half-baked director 2 director homage. It's bad enough that the opening doesn't seem all that engaged in Kurosawa's richer ideas about capitalism, corporate gamesmanship, family dynamics, or extra-familial bonds. Worse, though, Highest 2 Lowest barely seemed to engage its own thoughts about any of that, despite Washington seeming suited up, spry, and ready to play.
So praise Spike, praise the Knicks, praise the 40 acres and the mule: a few, overlapping things happen about an hour into Highest 2 Lowest that significantly lift the film, or at least my experience of it. One is that a fateful subway ride—the site of a devilishly difficult and highest-of-high-stakes errand, also well-known to High and Low viewers—finds Lee immersing himself more deeply and creatively in the story's propositions. This isn't necessarily a surprise: filming action and environment has often inspired Lee to better sequences than those that privilege character on its own terms or attempt to construct relationships. Lee knows that train like he knows the veins on his own wrist, and he knows each stop just as deeply, as well as the cities within cities that make up New York. He knows just what he wants to show us. Having flubbed so many compulsories in Hour 1, he seems to enjoy the tricky, freestyle double-movement of barreling in more tightly on David's predicament while also dilating way outward, such that David is but a smallish comet hurtling through the whirling, colorful solar systems of increasingly upper Manhattan.
And another thing about that literal pivot between the movie's two halves, which even culminates in the pivot between two cars: the lighting and color grade don't look anything like what we've seen up to that point. I don't know if they actually switched cameras or stock or if Libatique just deftly fed that illusion, but the images suddenly have texture. They are sallow in the warrens of the MTA, smudgy but luminous in the passenger cars, streaky but brightly tactile in the open air. Lee and Libatique are filming again. Highest 2 Lowest now seems to transpire in a world, not an interface. Washington, like his character, is knocked off his pedestal in a variety of ways, just as he's about to face some worthier adversaries: not just the kidnapper he's pursuing and the actor who plays him but the longtime bestie/employee whose trust is badly shaken, plus a son newly emboldened to dress his father down, not just on ethical grounds but artistic ones, as an older man who no longer knows the game. If that sounds like how you might have felt about Lee during Highest 2 Lowest's long, aggressively mid first half, that starts to feel like a feature, not a bug, in Lee's design.
It's best at every point not to hold Highest 2 Lowest too tightly in comparison to High and Low. That's a daunting side-by-side for any movie to survive, but more importantly, Lee's version is hunting some different game. Whether because he's unable or unwilling to critique capitalism as rigorously as Kurosawa did, Lee seems much more energized about the attention economy and the chasm of misrecognition between older and newer media forms. Perhaps not surprisingly, the film takes pains to racialize this conflict in some pointedly and productively black terms. David's celebrity producer status is hardly possible in a post-2000 context outside the worlds of hip-hop, R&B, and their evolving recombinations. While Highest 2 Lowest does not exceptionalize David as black royalty within his profession, the stakes of him owning his own company or getting publicly knocked from his pedestal (and taking a mostly POC enterprise down with him) are still more fraught than they would be if he were white. For his part, Trey is specifically, vocally mortified about the exact, dead-to-rights ways that Black Twitter will come for him if his famous dad doesn't act right.
But that's not the half of it. In those long, climactic stretches for which Highest 2 Lowest will be remembered, David isn't just hunting down a criminal who extorted him and who very nearly ruined two families. When he inevitably meets up with his taunting nemesis, played by A$AP Rocky (as emblematic of one generation of Black stardom as Washington is of his), David has more to ponder than what type or degree of vengeance he's prepared to extract. Does he hate this man, or does something stop David from hating him? Does he hate the man's music? Or is he resentful that he can't relate to it, can't "hear" it with his celebrated ears, can't situate it with confidence on his decades-old metrics of creative value? Also: how far is he willing to go to end this man's life, literally or figuratively? In a movie where the prison industry vacillates between overt and implied presence, A$AP Rocky is an unrepentant malefactor but also a young brother (and husband, and father) who probably won't survive whatever punishment he's assigned. So what does David want to be? His judge? His executioner? His mentor? His benefactor? Maybe even his beneficiary, if the young man's music, however mysterious to David, is the only way he'll recapture a career that the rest of the plot has already capsized? Is Yung Felon who David once was, or is that both a too-romantic and too-intolerable thought for David to countenance?
I'm avoiding any specifics as to how exactly Highest 2 Lowest raises or follows these questions. The film, both to its credit and at cost of some disappointment, gets not much further than a messy series of quasi-answers. I expect its final sequence to be divisive, not least in the one-two punch of which artist gets offered a ladder and which gets pushed down a chute. I imagine even my own reactions might differ across viewings. But the joy is that for a good long while, from middle 2 end, you could hear a metaphorical pin drop in Highest 2 Lowest, notwithstanding some booming bass tracks. I was in an Alamo Drafthouse recliner and still managed to be at the edge of my seat. Having amassed only modest credibility as it got going, Highest 2 Lowest eventually elaborates a scenario where almost any choice that its script makes in its last 45 minutes is both provocative and multi-layered. Almost any of Washington's formidable line-readings, nonverbal gestures, and temperature variations can have measurable impact on what the film "means." It's an incredibly exciting plane for this movie to reach, particularly given the infertile state of the art form, which Lee all but openly critiques through both the barely veiled surrogate of the music industry and, I'm betting, the gaudy digitality of the initial photography, since later passages expose that visual scheme as a choice, not a default. For my money, Sinners and Eddington are this film's only companions among wide-release U.S. movies this year to implicate their characters and their audiences within narrative, moral, and political puzzles that are worth taking up—even or especially if the prospect of "solving" them isn't on the table.
Lee has always been enough of an inconsistent filmmaker that you never know what you're going to get. Anything from a fresh-hewn monument to an outright face-plant could be in the offing. His last two scripted features, BlacKkKlansman and Da 5 Bloods, pretty decisively squandered their early potentials, so it wasn't hard to imagine Highest 2 Lowest would do the same, or that it might get more involving without necessarily getting "better." But I think the film gets deeper and knottier, so much so that even its silences and debatably cut corners (that final shot of Wright!) feel like active prompts to reflect and debate. The incontrovertibly homely photography of both the start and finish feel intentional, as is the fact that the film looks best when the protagonist's fate is worst. Maybe that's giving too much credit, but I think it's a bigger risk to extend too little. He's an erratic player, Spike Lee, but he's clearly still got game. B
(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd, where you can comment.)
