You can always tell a Spike Lee joint, even if those very words didn’t reliably pop up in the opening credits every time. There’s always a throbbing sense of anger, I find, mixed in with an unmistakable, earnest appreciation for the art and culture of a place and time. You could see a lot of that in Katrina: Come Hell and High Water, and you can feel it reverberating from the subway tracks in Highest 2 Lowest, his cover-band take on Akira Kurosawa’s classic noir High and Low, itself adapted from Ed McBain’s novel King’s Ransom. This is a Spike Lee joint in every sense, big and formally daring and pulsing with auteur energy, but the filmmaker’s trademark indulgences don’t all pay off and leave the whole thing running a little too long for its own good.
What to do? No self-respecting critic would wish a Spike Lee movie had less Spike Lee stuff in it, even if Highest 2 Lowest would be a sturdier genre picture if that were the case. But you have to take the rough with the smooth. The best scenes by far are also the bits that would have been left on the cutting room floor if this material landed in the hands of a set-’em-up-knock-’em-down director, including two extended sequences of Denzel Washington going toe-to-toe with A$AP Rocky, of all people, one of them styled as an impromptu rap battle.
The overall effect of this is an impressive movie that deserves to be seen as-is, albeit a flawed one where any recommendation has to come with a “mileage may vary” qualifier. This is perhaps about right for a Spike Lee joint, especially in 2025.
In its broad strokes, Higher 2 Lower has the same premise as the original. A wealthy and influential man, in this case, taste-making music producer David King (Washington, The Equalizer), wants to protect his company from a soulless corporate takeover by buying out a business partner to secure a controlling interest. But since the studio barely breaks even these days, the buyout requires liquidating a lot of assets and taking out a lot of loans. No sooner has David seemingly pulled off this risky financial play, his son, Trey (Aubrey Joseph, Marvel’s Runaways), is kidnapped and held to a hefty ransom.
The twist is that the kidnapper has gotten Trey mixed up with his best friend and David’s godson, Kyle (Elijah Wright), himself the son of David’s driver, Paul (Jeffrey Wright, The Last of Us), an ex-con who owes David a lot already. Now, David has to weigh up spending his borrowed money and risking his own future to secure the freedom of someone else’s son rather than his own, which is a much tougher predicament to be in. The movie does a decent job of examining both sides of this dilemma, and it avoids the easy avenue of having David be so self-serving that the decision is made for him. It’s clear that Paul is as much a part of David’s family as Trey and his wife, Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera, Godfather of Harlem), but it’s also made clear how passionate he is about his company and the music it promotes and how tenuous his work-life balance is.
Music is the backbeat of Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, and it’s used in more interesting ways than David simply being a producer. He speaks to photos of Stevie Wonder and James Brown, which is a bit on the nose, but his famous ears – the best in the business, apparently – also factor into a crucial plot point, and there’s a real earnestness in its appreciation of music as the cornerstone of a culture, a time capsule of memories and a gold-paved road to fame and fortune. That last bit isn’t misjudged, either. David has been successful, and people often treat him like a kingmaker, but he recalls what it was like to “have nothing and want everything”, and when the movie pivots into more action-oriented territory towards the end, David and Paul, who both grew up in a rough neighborhood, don’t feel out of place.
As in the original, a highlight is a protracted suspense sequence, this one aboard a New York subway train heading to Yankee Stadium. But Washington’s scenes with A$AP Rocky as an aspiring young rapper fizz the most, and twice the latter holds his own with the former, which I can’t say I expected when I saw his name on the billing. There’s an authenticity in these exchanges that likely comes from experience, giving texture to the underlying, unspoken conflict between musicians who make money and artists who make music, whether they get paid for it or not. The industry tends to favour one over the other, and part of David’s arc is realising which side of the equation he’d prefer to be on.
All this is to say that Highest 2 Lowest is a good, crowd-pleasing movie, if perhaps not a great one, given that it can sometimes feel inert and navel-gazing in its second act. But Washington and Wright are reliably great in it, while A$AP Rocky reveals himself as a surprisingly compelling screen presence. Just catching a glimpse of the sports and music memorabilia in David’s apartment – a lot of it, I’m led to believe, from Spike Lee’s own collection – is worth the price of admission, which, given it’s streaming on Apple TV,+ is nothing at all.