One of Spike Lee’s best films of this century, Highest 2 Lowest is pure cinema. A soapy, sudsy, campy, bombastically performed meditation on morality, success, legacy, and loyalty, Lee’s latest joint relishes both the simple pleasures of moviemaking and its most potent forces. It blends stylish filmmaking and a breakneck pulse with a roaring sense of place and character to pay tribute to a fellow auteur great, making it a film that’s nearly impossible to look away from. Adapted from Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 High and Low, itself based on Ed McBain’s detective novel King’s Ransom, Highest 2 Lowest straddles genres effectively to paint a portrait of a man who has carved out his own little kingdom. That man, played with quicksilver ferocity by Denzel Washington, must reckon with what matters most as his world threatens to crumble around him from an escalating series of eternal forces.
Denzel is David King, music mogul and figurehead of Stackin’ Hits Records, a label that peaked in the early 2000s and has been scrambling to break even ever since, though has retained some cultural relevance. King blames declining sales on the shifting priorities of the attention economy as much as on selling off controlling interest, leaving the “music” part of the music business playing second fiddle to the “business” part. Once hailed as the future of the industry, he’s now looking more and more like its past. In a bid to prevent a corporate buyout of the company he built and to protect the young Black artists he’s mentored, King schemes to regain a controlling stake. But plans grind to a halt when a phone call announces his son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) has been kidnapped for a $17.5 million ransom.
Aided by his devoted confidante Paul (Jeffrey Wright) and a police negotiation team more interested in doing things “by the book” than doing them effectively, David is ready to liquidate anything and everything to save his son. That calculus changes when it turns out the victim isn’t his son at all but his godson Kyle (Elijah Wright, Jeffrey Wright’s son both on and off screen), raising the prickly question of whether a man should bankrupt himself to save a friend’s child. For proverbial family isn’t the same as flesh-and-blood family, especially when a literal fortune is on the line.
[READ MORE: Our review of ‘Gladiator II’ directed by Ridley Scott and starring Denzel Washington]
Alan Fox’s screenplay asks you to forgive plenty, from the police behaving like neon signs during the ransom drop to their seeming to not interrogate prime suspects to the abrupt resolution of King’s central moral dilemma. His sudden change of heart feels like a missing reel of internal conflict. But it’s all in service of a movie that, while loose in places and decidedly committed to the highs and the lows of cinema, keeps its focus sharp on the one thing that matters: David King.
Highest 2 Lowest is at once a police procedural, a crime drama, a music-driven mystery, and above all a character study. The pacing lumbers in spots, and the tonal swerves—from operatic family melodrama to procedural grit—can be whiplashy. But thematically the film is rock-solid. Lee explores the cost of legacy from multiple angles, making King’s dream of reclaiming his title as the “best ears in the business” feel just as vital as the ransom narrative driving the genre thrills. Lee’s hand is steady when it counts, and the soapy excesses feel intentional, baked into the film’s style and swagger rather than reaching for provocation.
Denzel is a force of nature here, the best he’s been in a decade and a reminder of why he’s one of our greatest living actors. He’s onscreen for nearly the entire 132-minute runtime and there isn’t a moment when he doesn’t shine. And while this is his show, A$AP Rocky as a hip-hop artist from the streets named Yung Felon steals every scene he’s in. A late-game studio booth sequence between him and Denzel—complete with an off-the-cuff freestyle battle—crackles with the kind of unpredictable magic you only get in the works of masters.
[READ MORE: Our review of ‘Fences’ directed by and starring Denzel Washington]
The score from Howard Drossin though is an odd fit throughout. The dramatic piano-and-strings motif feels imported straight from Kurosawa’s original, which is more interesting in theory than execution, as it plays as out of tune with the Bronx setting and the story’s thrills. Swapping in an urban, pulsing score and I feel like the movie enters another orbit entirely. As is, it occasionally sounds like someone dropped a mild-mannered doo-wop vinyl over an edgy crime thriller.
Nevertheless, this is Spike Lee’s best movie in quite some time, and he knows he’s working with sacred text. Like its title, Highest 2 Lowest revels in extremes, swinging from the high-gloss melodrama about family loyalty and the depths of friendships to the heavy thematic weight of power, sabotage, and legacy. By transplanting Kurosawa’s story to the Bronx and into the cutthroat music industry, Lee makes it his own. It’s complex, layered, and brimming with life, as much an examination of modern New York living as Yurosawa’s is about Japan in the 1960s.
The production design comes to alive in every frame, the Bronx rendered not as backdrop but as a living, breathing participant in the drama, the streets just a text away from King’s towering apartment. The art that decorates King’s high-rise pad feels deeply ingrained in his identity, and Lee lingers on what adorns his walls, not just to deepen our sense of King as a character, but to underscore the scope and vastness of Black art. It’s stylish, personal, and cool, inviting you to lean in and notice the little details that help give Highest 2 Lowest shade and shape.
Sure, there are little things that feel clunky or off—a line delivery here, a scene transition there, a plot hole or two—but they barely register against the film’s unyielding gravitational pull. Highest 2 Lowest has immaculate vibes, the kind of swaggering, full-bodied energy a director for hire couldn’t fake, and Denzel is a towering force at its center offering peak Denzel. A few music-driven sequences rank among the best of the year, moments where story, performance, and rhythm interlock together so perfectly you feel lucky just to bask in its genius.
CONCLUSION: ‘Highest 2 Lowest’, an Apple and A24 co-production, sees American auteur Spike Lee transplant Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 classic to modern-day NYC with bristling detail. It’s at once melodramatic and Shakespearean, satisfying the viewers high and low tastes, with a killer turn from Denzel Washington.
B+
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By: Matt Oakes
Started blogging about film in college when the university paper wouldn’t have him. Dislikes your consensus film Twitter favorites. Devotee of horror movies that make him die a little inside. Catches films at festivals when he can. Proud SFCS and OFCS member and Tomatometer-approved critic. Editor-in-chief of Silver Screen Riot.
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