Titled like a sequel, plotted like a remake, and shot with enough of its own singular verve to ensure that most people never think of it as either of those things, Spike Lee’s deliriously entertaining — if jarringly upbeat — “Highest 2 Lowest” modernizes the post-war anxieties of Akira Kurosawa’s “High and Low” for the age of parasocial relationships.
Formerly a hyper-capitalistic shoe magnate embodied by the wolfish Toshiro Mifune, Kingo Gondo has been reborn as record executive David King (Denzel Washington, in what might be his most towering screen performance since “Training Day”). Likewise, the glass mansion his progenitor owned atop the hills of Yokohama has been swapped out for a penthouse apartment at the Olympia building in Dumbo — soon to become a minor tourist attraction if this refreshing late summer treat is seen widely enough during the two-week theatrical run that will precede its disappearance into the annals of Apple TV+.
Beyond that, however, the basic chords of the song remain the same as they were back in 1963, even if Lee includes a bit more screaming directly into the camera about how much Boston’s sports teams suck than I remember there being in Kurosawa’s take. Once again, our protagonist is forced into a compromising position on the eve of a critical business deal when a downtrodden kidnapper mistakes his driver’s son for his own kid, Trey (Aubrey Joseph). And once again, all the money in the world can’t save him from paying a price for his greed.
The world is a very different place than it was 60 years ago, but some things never change; when people lose hope, they still turn against the people who gave it to them. Only now, the cash-strapped kidnapper doesn’t have to physically look up at the rich man’s castle in order to be taunted by his fortune (although Lee makes sure to include a scene where the criminal does that anyway). In the version of the story that screenwriter William Alan Fox has reworked for 2025, the bad guy may not be able to spy his idol and nemesis from his own apartment in Forest Hills, but he feels like David is personally mocking him every time he looks at his phone.
Even at a time of immense economic stratification, technology has the power to make people’s dream lives seem close enough to reach out and grab for themselves, and that closeness is especially palpable for a young Black rapper (A$AP Rocky, just as good here as he is in recent Sundance highlight “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”), who sees so much of himself in the multi-millionaire CEO of Stackin’ Hits records. He feels like they know each other already, and that the real crime is that they don’t.
The truth, however, is that David King — or King David, as he’s been crowned by the New York media — is no longer as secure in his throne as he was during the pre-Spotify golden age of 2000s hip-hop. Pushing 70 in a young man’s game, the hitmaker with “the best ears in the business” has been on the brink of irrelevance for the last few years, and his dwindling market share has only led him further astray from his famously impeccable taste. Despite promising his wife Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera, giving beneficent Queen Macbeth) that he’d sell his empire and saunter off into the sunset, David’s wounded pride inspires a desperate bid to buy out his partner and recover full ownership of the label, and he’ll need every cent he’s got in order to pull it off. Needless to say, the best ears in the business may not be able to save David from listening to the worst voices in his head after a kidnapper demands a $17.5 million ransom for the safe return of his chauffeur’s son.
Only so much can be gained from comparing Lee’s movie against the much tenser and more severe Kurosawa masterpiece that inspired it (and was itself based on the Evan Hunter novel “King’s Ransom”), but the relationship between David and his driver is one of the few areas where “Highest 2 Lowest” clearly comes out on top. If Washington owns every minute of this film, riveting as he grasps for a righteousness that his money can’t seem to buy him, Jeffrey Wright’s heartsick performance as David’s best friend and closest employee is the friction that gives purchase to his character’s inner conflict.
Paul grew up with David, but life took him in another direction, and he’s been living in the King’s penthouse ever since he got out of jail. “It’s just fucking money!” Trey might insist, but the financial dependence at the core of his dad’s universe is so obvious that all of David’s conversations with Paul are silently choked with the fear of acknowledging it, but when David waffles over paying the ransom for Paul’s son (a ransom he was more than ready to pay when he thought his own son had been nabbed), the unspoken truth at the center of their friendship begins to rip the two men apart. Such is the price they pay for trying to pretend — as so many people do — that money is somehow able to exist without a moral dimension.
The tension between David and Paul keeps “Highest 2 Lowest” upright even when the movie around it threatens to go slack. Lee doesn’t share Kurosawa’s patience for long, talky, single-location sequences, and his attempts at Ice Spicing up this relatively low-event movie can be more trouble than they’re worth, even if Ice Spice herself is acquitted on all charges for her two seconds of screen time.
Hard cuts, double takes, and strange cameos are par for the course with Spike, but those affectations tend to distract from the primacy of this film’s performances. Elsewhere, and everywhere, Howard Drossin’s wildly intrusive orchestral score smothers every moment in a wall of sound that burrows into your head like hold music and refuses to discriminate between moods. That garishness also seeps into Matthew Libatique’s digital cinematography, but there it works to the advantage of this movie’s heated sense of panic (not “Do the Right Thing” or “Summer of Sam” hot, but sweltering enough to feel David lose his cool).
Then again, there isn’t exactly a lot to see. While it would be absurd to suggest that Lee’s reimagination doesn’t have its own vivid sense of place (a famous sequence, now set aboard the 6 train as it travels from Borough Hall to the Bronx, flattens New York City into a unified socioeconomic class of Yankees fans), the film’s general disinterest in replicating the verticality of Kurosawa’s version takes away from a third act plunge into the kidnapper’s environment.
But Lee is so much more interesting for what he brings to a project than for what he takes away from it, and “Highest 2 Lowest” is naturally at its best when it deviates from its source material. The film’s wholehearted embrace of Black culture is baked into David’s desire to protect Stackin’ Hits from buyers who might dilute the brand of its history, but it’s also suffused into the various changes that Lee’s version makes to the story’s third act, which pivots away from the darkness of Japan’s post-war heroin epidemic and towards the aspirational aspects of hip-hop. No spoilers, but at a certain point in the movie Denzel Washington is forced to rap for his life. It shouldn’t work, and it definitely almost doesn’t, but director and star alike commit to the bit with the same intensity that they’ve always committed to each other, and somehow they make it sing.
That’s one of several risks Lee takes in service of making “Highest 2 Lowest” significantly more fun and hopeful than any iteration of this story has ever been before — risks which are all in the service of showcasing, to quote the press notes, “the transcendent power of music and the loving bonds of a close-knit African American family.” If this story of economic despair and its malcontents doesn’t seem like it was ever intended to be a vehicle for those messages, Lee doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo, as he eschews the morally ambiguous despair of Kurosawa’s ending in favor of a kumbaya for the richest family in town. King David may not be the same bottom-line obsessed despot at the end of this film that he was at the start, and it’s hard to swallow the last scene’s glib conclusion that a little humility is enough to make everything right.
And so Lee’s reinterpretation strains to leave us on a high instead of a low, as befits the finale of an update so compellingly eager to flip the script on one of Kurosawa’s most cynical films. It is just fucking money, at the end of the day. But then again, what isn’t?
Grade: B
“Highest 2 Lowest” premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. A24 will release it in theaters on Friday, August 22, and it will be available to stream on Apple TV starting Friday, September 5.
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