All Money Ain't Good Money

Highest 2 Lowest [2025]

Film

When a titan music mogul is targeted with a ransom plot, he is jammed up in a life-or-death moral dilemma. A reinterpretation of Akira Kurosawa's crime thriller High and Low, now played out on the mean streets of modern-day New York City.

Highest 2 Lowest, the latest work from the illustrious and inimitable Spike Lee, is notable for a few reasons. It is Spike's 25th scripted feature film (for those of you keeping score at home), his first feature in five years (remember Da 5 Bloods?), and perhaps most notably, his fifth (and hopefully not final) collaboration with the always-formidable Denzel Washington, who is as fresh, persistent, and powerful as he's ever been. Co-produced by A24 and Apple (what a time to be alive), this film isn’t a “remake” per se, a term that can sound so unbecoming and often comes with a certain stink attached. Labeling Highest 2 Lowest a “remake” would be a bit of a misnomer – I'd call this more of a “remix” than a remake. Instead of being just a spiritual successor to High and Low, which is one of the premier late-career masterworks of the late, great Akira Kurosawa, Lee’s new film is a modern reinvention of an old-school classic, crafted to iterate upon rather than replicate its source material.

Less so the kind of pedigreed vanity project we’re all familiar with and often allergic to, this film is more experimental and self-aware than your run-of-the-mill rehash. Despite some of the film’s offbeat idiosyncrasies (many of which worked for me) and brazen imperfections (some of which felt easy to see but mostly forgivable), Highest 2 Lowest will be remembered foremost as a long-overdue cinematic homecoming of sorts for Denzel and Spike, who have not collaborated on a project in nearly twenty years (since Inside Man way back in 2006). Their reunion here offers the chance for audiences to see one of the all time best actor-director duos do the damn thing (at least) one more time, which is, at an absolute minimum, well worth your time and full attention.

You may be wondering, "Do I need to see High and Low to fully appreciate what Highest 2 Lowest, from both a technical and emotional perspective? To that I say... uhh, most likely? Having not seen the High and Low (I'm embarrassed to admit that sometimes, I do skip the homework even though it is a mainstay on the Criterion Channel), I recognize that having an honest discussion about the merits of this film without the contextual fabric and framework of the of Kurosawa's classic is folly. What I can offer (which has never been much to boast about tbh) is a simple but straight-ahead, text-level reading of Lee's film, thanks to the fact that my POV on the matter is unsullied by the past and will focus solely on what is on screen.

If you’re comparing Highest 2 Lowest to Kurosawa’s OG film’s Letterboxd summary, you’ll see it has a nearly identical nuts-and-bolts story setup: “In the midst of an attempt to take over his company, a powerhouse executive is hit with a huge ransom demand when his chauffeur’s son is kidnapped by mistake.” Lee’s iteration is set in the beating heart of New York City, Denzel plays David King, a successful and renowned record producer who is the CEO of Stackin’ Hit Records. He has a close personal relationship with his hired driver, Paul Christopher, played with a twitchy precision and undeniable humility by the always superb Jeffrey Wright. Like its predecessor, the story hangs and hinges upon a wobbly ethical conundrum, where professional motivations are measured and tested against personal obligations.

Early on, it is revealed that King is putting the pieces in place to spend nearly every dime of his accrued fortune to buy back majority control of the company he built from the ground up. Right when things are coming together for King’s deal, he and Paul’s sons, Trey (Aubrey Joseph) and Kyle (Elijah Wright), are kidnapped (we’ll later know who this perpetrator is). Trey, being King’s son, is the intended target, while Kyle is just the collateral – the plan here is simple: kidnap the business mogul’s son and demand a multi-million-dollar price for his safe return, easy peasy. Things go sideways when Trey is inadvertently let go instead of Kyle, forcing King and his wife, Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera), to work with the police to pay the ransom using the money King intended to use in his buyout in exchange for Kyle’s life.

Highest 2 Lowest [2025]

There are a lot of interesting filmmaking components to mention briefly. The film is shot by the slick and savvy DP Matthew Libatique, who perfectly calibrates his shot list to capture and frame both the high and low of this story with a dynamic visual palette. He is certainly one of the best cinematographers working today, and he continues to demonstrate the ability to enhance storytelling choices through the scope of his lens. Next, I need to call attention to Howard Drossin's score, which sets a very stately tone in the film's first half, almost to a distracting effect. I was at first skeptical that the musical choices were working at all, but with time, I felt like I settled into the vibe that Lee was clearly going for, even if it is a bit off-kilter and sometimes out of place. And then there's Denzel, who holds everything together and gets to reckon with his fame and iconography, which I found to be fascinating. This isn't campy like his performance in Gladiator II, nor does it offer him the opportunity to escape into the darkness and abyss like he did in The Tragedy of Macbeth. No, this is a fully-realized and limitless character for Denzel to explore, and he interrogates every nuance with a level of power and finesse that he alone may be capable of at this point in his career. It may not be the one we remember him by, but it does capture him and is representative of his caliber and magnetism as a force and presence on the big screen.

What's most interesting about Highest 2 Lowest isn't the story or its characters, per say – it's the wide and eclectic array of filmmaking choices Lee delivers at every twist and turn. The film pays direct homage to High and Low by not only following a similar narrative structure, but also through its probing social commentary related to issues of socioeconomic class and late-stage capitalism. For me, what really elevates the film is the creative sensibility Lee projects onto the material. Sure, he modernizes the story, but more importantly, he bends its themes to his will, turning what might have otherwise been a stale concept into something fresh.

There is a multiplicity of what the notion of "high vs. low" is in Highest 2 Lowest, which extends far beyond rich vs. poor, penthouse vs. streets, etc. The point worth making about the subtext of the film (which frankly isn't all that enlightening) is that there is a nearly nonstop juxtaposition between the "high and low" of all art, including acting, musical performance, painting, and writing, to name just a few. In remixing this Kurosawa classic (not remaking it), Lee had the creative liberty to play dress up as a filmmaker, where he could channel the craft and exercise the framing choices made in High and Low, while still play around in the sandbox and see where his instincts take him. So, Highest 2 Lowest isn't just a traditional procedural, nor is it just a high-brow melodrama, nor is it just a genre exercise, nor is it just a gritty, pulpy B-movie. In fact, it gets to be something even better. It gets to be a Spike Lee Joint.

The end-result leads to a feeling that Highest 2 Lowest may in fact be a major, not minor, work from Lee. The film gradually accumulates all its ideas and aligns its intentions as it builds into something that is far greater than the sum of its individual parts. Highest 2 Lowest couldn't have been called just High and Low (Spike's Version) because it doesn't strive to just celebrate Kurosawa, it works hard to not only channel him but also challenge him. Regardless of whether you think it all coalesces together, I found myself marveling at Lee's bold ambition and Denzel's relentless commitment. At an absolute minimum, Spike and Denzel's projects remain, to this day, an appointment-viewing fixture of modern movie-going – you're going to be hard-pressed to find something with as high of a floor.