Spike Lee’s New Joint, ‘Highest 2 Lowest,’ Is Mid

Denzel Washington does his thing, and A$AP Rocky holds his own, but the film is all flash and no substance with very little to say.

(Photo by David Lee/Courtesy of Apple)

Spike Lee’s latest joint, Highest 2 Lowest, puts a 2025 Black male spin on the 1963 Akira Kurosawa classic police procedural High and Low. In both films, when a poor man tries to even the scales by kidnapping who he mistakenly believes is the wealthy man’s son, the wealthy man must weigh losing everything he has to pay the ransom for a child that’s not actually his.

In this remake, Denzel Washington stars as the wealthy man, David King, a famous music executive. The film’s title sums up King’s first act. One minute, he’s on his Brooklyn penthouse balcony, so high up that he’s overlooking the bridge and the Manhattan skyline, reveling in buying back a majority ownership stake of his long-time record label. The next minute, a kidnapper (a chilling A$AP Rocky) calls to tell King he has taken King’s teenage son, Trey, and is holding him ransom for $17.5 million. Of course, the kidnapper really has King’s chauffeur’s son, Kyle, instead, but still demands the full ransom or Kyle dies.

To complicate (or simplify) matters, King’s chauffeur Paul (an always great Jeffrey Wright) is one of King’s best friends from back in the day, before King became one. King even calls Kyle his godson before the kidnapping, making the relationship tighter than the employer-employee relationship from Kurosawa’s adaptation. Yet the choice to pay a ruinous $17.5 million or not still becomes the height of tension between King, Paul and even the police.

This is, after all, a remake of one of the most iconic police procedurals. High and Low features brilliant police detective work to catch a serial murderer and kidnapper. Highest 2 Lowest is set all over Lee’s beloved New York City, which means, inevitably, featuring one of the most loathsome, corrupt and infamous police departments in the country: the NYPD.

I admit, I was nervous to see Lee’s take on this plotline. In 2018, after the release of his Oscar-winning copaganda film Blackkklansman, it was revealed that Lee was paid over $200,000 for consulting on NYPD community policing ads during the height of the movement for Black lives and was lambasted by the Black community for it.

Thankfully, this appears to be one criticism of Lee’s work that has had an impact on his filmmaking. Highest 2 Lowest subverts the police procedural model of the original by making the NYPD little more than racist, classist, incompetent obstacles to progress. In that regard, it’s practically a documentary. Instead, King and Paul team up to find the kidnapper themselves and bring him to justice. The film’s theme is King’s refrain (and perhaps a mea culpa from Lee on that $200K): “All money ain't good money.”

For anyone who was also worried about this, as I was: There is no police shooting of Black people in this movie! Phew!

What follows is a very Spike Lee, very New York, very thrilling take on Kurosawa’s cinematic standard, with plenty of winks, nudges and fourth-wall breaking to the audience that is fun at times but makes the film tonally uneven, with a garish, unmatching score underneath and a lot of suspended disbelief.

In the age of Black music mogul billionaires, we’re to believe that $17.5 million is a number that could ruin a “beloved” music titan like King. Even if they are actually living above their means in a Brooklyn penthouse that’s at least worth $17.5 million alone (a near-identical Dumbo penthouse with the same view as King’s is on Zillow right now for the discounted price of $16.995!), with a cold million dollars on Mrs. King’s ring finger, a Cartier Panthère bracelet worth $305,000 on her wrist, and $500,000 annual checks to charity—do they not have wealthy friends? Who are their people? There’s a scene where King cries out to Stevie Wonder for help like he’s a dead ancestor. Literally, pick up the phone?! That’s not to mention the man has Basquiats on the wall! With an ‘s’! I need more context if I’m to believe $17.5M would destroy them.

I realize that the ransom amount needed to be small enough to fit inside a single Nike Air Jordan backpack to fulfill the film’s sponsorship deal and make the coolest sequences of the film happen, but then update the currency to untraceable bitcoin wallet cards worth $100 million, or some other incredibly overwhelming number to a semi-wealthy person.

But the aforementioned coolest sequences of the film are so tight that it’s almost worth overlooking the fuzzy math. Lee sees Kurosawa’s gorgeous, action-packed train set piece and raises him with two gorgeous, action-packed train set pieces of his own that capture the evil genius of the kidnapper and how well he knows New York, compared to the King, who has long since become detached.

Setting the film in the ever-changing music world allows Lee to float ideas about the soulless corporatization of art and lament the increased role of A.I. over the human beings who make art and life worthwhile. Yet, even with more than a two-hour runtime, we never quite get to the depths of, well, anything.

Instead of any analysis on colorism, sexism and ageism for women in the music industry, Lee simply perpetuates all of these things with his paper-bag test visual language. Every woman who is supposed to be viewed positively—as beautiful, as talented, as desirable—is biracial or Latina. Light-skinned women surround King at home, at the gates of his office and even inside it. The only dark-skinned woman character is one of the loathsome NYPD detectives who touts Spelman College and “Black woman excellence” while working for the NYPD unironically.

Where brown men from King to Trey to A$AP Rocky’s character Yung Felon abound, Lee fills out scenes with light-skinned women like Ice Spice and Princess Nokia to solidify King and his record label as the center of culture.

Want Gina from Martin to play Denzel’s wife, Pam? Don’t call the original and age-appropriate Tisha Campbell, who would’ve looked just as gorgeous and had better chemistry with the star; cast the lookalike who is 30 years younger than Denzel, give them a 17-year-old son and pray the audience can’t add or subtract. That’s not to mention how stripped of her role as the emotional core of the Kurosawa original the wife’s character is. Where Kurosawa’s Mrs. Gondo begged her husband to save the chauffeur’s son, even if it meant a life of poverty she had never known, Mrs. King’s response to potential poverty is essentially “fuck that kid,” which could have been interesting if we knew anything substantive about her character. But thinly written light-skinned women are par for the course in a Spike Lee Joint.

Though Lee just announced his support for the Democratic Socialist NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, there’s no real class analysis in Lee’s film. Though Jeffrey Wright is a gut punch as a grieving father without means to save his son, there’s no real exploration of the ways capitalism keeps Paul and King from ever being real “family”; any class tensions there are quickly resolved by Paul’s overwhelming gratefulness to King. There’s no real commentary on the corrupting power of wealth like in the anticapitalist original; King goes from wanting to be on top even at the risk of his family, to wanting to be on top with his family. Much like Lee’s own evolution as a filmmaker, the status quo remains.

And while Lee’s disdain for online critics is palpable (Trey goes on a rant about how “Black Twitter” has turned against him), King’s message of logging off the attention economy and reconnecting to what’s “real” is undercut by King launching his revolutionary new label with the goal of getting back to “the music” but using the same kind of Ice Spice and Princess Nokia artists that surrounded him at his old label: young, skinny, light-skinned, and scantily clad. Trey literally touts the new artist to King by describing her as “a more-light-skinneded Zendaya” as a selling point. So what’s the real message?

Highest 2 Lowest is a playground for Denzel, and he is at his best. A$AP Rocky rises to the occasion, holding his own with Denzel in the film’s best scenes. And it’s all for the best; this is, after all, a story by men, about men, for men. With flash and thin substance, amazing performances and little to say, Highest 2 Lowest runs the gambit and lands firmly in the middle.

Highest 2 Lowest is in theaters now, streaming on Apple TV+ on Sept. 5