Highest 2 Lowest is the first feature film from Spike Lee since his 2020 one-two punch of American Utopia and Da Five Bloods, neither of which received the theatrical releases that they deserved thanks to the arrival of COVID. It also marks Lee’s fifth collaboration with Denzel Washington, the first since Inside Man, which became a classic of the contemporary heist thriller genre from the moment that it premiered way back in 2006. And yet, while you would think that this would be the kind of cinematic occasion that would earn tons of pre-release hype and publicity, especially in the wake of its world premiere earlier this summer at Cannes, it barely seems to have registered on the cultural landscape thanks to the decision by Apple, who is distributing it, to give it only a token theatrical release for a couple of weeks before sending it to their Apple TV streaming service in early September.
Between their apparent reticence to give it a chance to attract a theatrical audience and the late August release date—a period usually looked upon as a time for studios to dump projects as quietly and painlessly as possible as moviegoers make the shift from summer blockbuster to the fall’s upcoming slate of Oscar bait—this might lead you to assume that the film as a whole was somewhat of a miss at best. And yet, in perhaps the final insult, Highest 2 Lowest proves to be anything but that. In fact, it is one of the smartest, canniest thrillers to come along in a long time—a film that combines visceral excitement, moral inquiry and cultural commentary in a slick and highly efficient manner that finds both Lee and Washington working at the height of their respective powers in ways that are enough to renew your faith in the possibilities of commercial American cinema, even coming at the tail end of one of the less inspiring summer movie seasons in recent memory.
The film is an Americanized remake of High and Low, the 1963 film that marked the next-to-last collaboration of another celebrate director-actor duo in Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune and which was itself an adaptation of an American-set novel by famed pulp fiction author Ed McBain. For a couple of decades now, a number of well-known names have attempted to get the project going—names like Martin Scorsese, David Mamet and Mike Nichols had been bandied about at various times—but none of them came together. This is perhaps not too surprising because the Kurosawa film is one of his great works—certainly the best of his modern-day films—and you have to assume that even filmmakers as strong as the ones cited above must have realized that unless they could figure out a way of somehow finding a unique twist to apply to the material that would keep it from seeming like a carbon copy, there was no real reason to even attempt such a thing. Here, Lee and screenwriter Alan Fox have managed to do just that by concocting a variation that follows the established premise in ways that will satisfy fans of the previous film but also goes off into new areas that prove to be so intriguing that there are times when the new stuff is even more engrossing than the tried and true.
Washington plays David King, a music impresario whose reputation as having “the best ears in the business” have led him to immense fame and fortune as the founder of the Stackin’ Hits record label. However, the recent seismic shifts have led him to contemplate entering into an agreement to sell the company to a massive conglomerate, a deal that will make him even more wealthy but will almost certainly shift the company from a place to known for nurturing new talents to concentrating solely on the big ticket artists and licensing their classic tunes for commercials and such. At the last minute, David has a change of heart and decides to instead leverage pretty much his entire net worth in order to purchase a controlling stake in the company, scotch the sale and ensure that the label stays true to its original goals while continuing to treat both employees and artists as part of an extended family, much to the surprise of his partners and especially to his wife, Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera) and teenaged son Trey (Aubrey Joseph).
All that intrigue is shifted to the background when King gets a phone call informing him that Trey, who is off for the day at basketball camp, has been kidnapped and that it will cost $17.5 million to get him back. The police arrive to set up camp at his luxury, memorabilia-filled Manhattan penthouse and begin investigating the case. Without hesitation, King is prepared to pay the money, even though doing so will ruin him financially. However, things get really complicated a few hours later when Trey is found and it turns out that, in a case of mistake identity, it was Kyle (Elijah Wright), the son of Paul (Jeffrey Wright), King’s loyal driver and confidant as well as Trey’s best friend, who was kidnapped. Suffice it to say, the police that were so solicitous towards King prove to be much less so towards Paul, who is obviously far lower on the economic scale than his boss. Then, when the kidnapper calls back and is informed that he does not have King’s son, he demands that King still pay the ransom or Kyle would be killed.
Well, what would you do in such a situation—if you were willing to destroy yourself financially in order to save your child, would you be just as willing to do that for someone else’s kid? Pam, Trey and especially Paul think the answer is “yes” and plead with King to pay the ransom and save Kyle. King, on the other hand, is more hesitant—he loves both Kyle and Paul without question but is not entirely sure that he loves them enough to ruin himself and his own actual flesh-and-blood family. He does hesitate at first but is clearly torn as to what to do, even going so far as to ask the portraits of legendary musical artists in his study for advice as to what to do. Instinctually, we know that King is eventually going to give in and pay the ransom, especially if you have seen the earlier film version, but Washington, delivering one of the genuine standout performances in his career, plays it in such a way so that you can actually believe that he might go the other way.
Everything about the film that I have described thus far takes up roughly the first half of the film and is set, aside from stops at the camp and the office, mostly within the confines of King’s penthouse and consists mostly of extended dialogue sequences setting up the plot. Although undeniably talky and heavy on setting up the narrative, it is never boring because Lee handles it deftly by holding back on the visual pyrotechnics in order to capture his actors sparking off of each other, bringing life to material that might have come across as mere boilerplate in the hands of others. He and Fox also use this section to weave in commentary and observations on the worlds of art and commerce and the ways in which they have been altered in the new media age, where an enormous online presence can be more important than actual talent and where one-time titans struggle to remain relevant to the times that they once defined. In one of most darkly funny moments, King’s ultimate decision to pay the ransom proves to be less out of a sense of nobility and more out of being convinced that the online backlash he would inevitably receive for not paying the ransom would destroy him both personally and professionally.
What happens from this point on, I will leave for you to discover. I will say that from this point on, the scene shifts from the apartment to the streets of New York and kicks off with one of the most astonishing setpieces in Lee’s entire filmmaking career. In the original film, you may recall, the ransom drop-off was staged upon a moving train. This time around, the location is a subway car that quickly and loudly fills up with Yankee fans heading to see their team play their most hated rivals and eventually shifts to a chase through city streets crowded with exuberant attendees of the Puerto Rican Day parade, including appearances from one of the most memorable veterans of Lee’s filmography and Eddie Palmiera, the celebrated Latin jazz musician who passed away just over a week ago and whose performance here serves as a fitting testament to his musical legacy. The entire sequence is absolutely breathtaking, with Lee paying homage to the classic pursuit sequence in such New York-based thrillers as The French Connection and Dressed to Kill while finding a way to give it his own personal touch. It is at this point that the film pretty much separates from Kurosawa’s as Lee offers up a combination of suspense, thrills, humor and strong performances from his actors, including rapper A$AP Rocky in a very convincing acting turn, that shows Lee, nearly 40 years after bursting onto the scene with She’s Gotta Have It, is still at the top of his game at orchestrating all the elements of cinema into something that, right from the start, feels alive in a way that most current films simply don’t.
From start to finish, Highest 2 Lowest is an absolute knockout, a film that not only reconfirms Lee’s position as one of our most inventive directors (and who, following the Oscar-winning BlacKkKlansman, American Utopia and Da 5 Bloods, is currently on one hell of a roll) but also shows that he has learned from the mistakes of his past attempts at remakes—the frankly embarrassing Oldboy and Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, his clunky version of the cult classic Ganja & Hess—by creating a film that pays due homage to its predecessor while feeling as vital and personal as anything he has ever done before. And yet, due to the confines of the current cultural moment and the new rules brought on by the streaming factor, a film that once upon a time would have almost certainly been a solid big-screen hit will, barring some miracle, only be seen theatrically by a fraction of those people before being consigned to the world of TVs, tablets and smartphones, the latter of which will almost certainly make hash of cinematographer Matthew Libatique’s compelling visuals. Make no mistake, however you see Highest 2 Lowest, and you really should, it is one of the most compelling, thought-provoking and flat-out entertaining films of the year. However, if you have the opportunity to see it in a theatre in the way that it meant to been seen, take it—you will not regret it for a moment.