Highest 2 Lowest Review: Spike Does Kurosawa

In adapting one of Kurosawa’s finest films, Highest 2 Lowest sees Spike Lee at his most introspective and fun. A$AP Rocky steals the show.

Lee has been here before; his remake of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy was criticized for being as unnecessary as it was generic. The 68-year-old director has clearly learned a few lessons from that debacle. With Highest 2 Lowest, he doesn’t reinvent the wheel, keeping the plot largely intact. However, he does put his own stamp on the material, giving us a colourful and fleet-footed romp that’s among his most personal and most purely entertaining films.

The elaborate camera moves and precise blocking in High and Low saw Kurosawa engage with Hitchcockian methods to put a Japanese spin on a very Western crime story. With Highest 2 Lowest, the filmmaker with whom Lee most engages in dialogue is himself. Thematically and narratively, the movie refers back to any number of Lee joints, right down to the casting of his frequent collaborator Denzel Washington. He plays David King, the head of Stackin’ Hits Records, which is in the middle of a power struggle. King is the king of the music industry, but after decades of building his brand and supporting Black artists, he’s only now able to put in a bid to buy a majority stake in his own company. 

It’s particularly fascinating to watch this just after Ryan Coogler’s Sinners took a bite out of the box office. For decades, Lee was the pre-eminent African-American filmmaker, the never-understated standard bearer for a sorely underrepresented minority in the industry. Now, as more African-American directors and actors become regular fixtures on the movie screens, it’s hard not to look at Highest 2 Lowest as Lee reckoning with his own position in the film business. It’s notable that the film didn’t even play in competition at Cannes, which fuelled rumours about its quality. Luckily, they were unfounded, but in making this film Lee definitely recognizes the new generation may be overtaking him.

Highest 2 Lowest is remarkably faithful to Kurosawa’s film. The original source material for both is Ed McBain’s novel High To Low, but while Kurosawa elevated McBain’s hard-boiled crime thriller to a dissection of postwar Japan’s social strata, Lee’s transposition of the action back to the U.S. brings back some of its original pulpy grit. The plot is exactly the same; an attempt is made to kidnap David’s son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) for ransom. While the kidnapper makes his demand to David and his wife Pam (Ilfenehs Hadera) for $17.5 million, it turns out Trey is fine, and the kidnapper has taken his friend Kyle (Elijah Wright) by mistake. Despite this, the kidnapper is steadfast: David has to pay up or the boy dies. It’s a doozy of a moral dilemma, and screenwriter William Alan Fox barely tweaks any details because he sees it’s already ripe with drama. 

Trey’s father Paul (Jeffrey Wright) is David’s chauffeur and confidant, but the ransom jeopardizes David’s ability to secure his holding on his company. This dilemma means the scenes between David, his family and his staff crackles. Washington and Wright are seasoned pros in their brand of exhausted confrontation. When Paul asks his boss, “How can you not pay?”, you find yourself remarkably invested in the anxieties of the wealthy.

Lee revisits his favoured theme of class conflict with the dynamic between the pair; Paul is an ex-con, and his and Kyle’s future was dependent on David’s largesse even before the kidnapping. David is forced to confront how his success has isolated him from where he came from. Highest 2 Lowest opens with drone shots of the Brooklyn skyscraper that houses his penthouse apartment, complete with views of Lower Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridge. As he’s forced to come down from his ivory tower, will David find the courage to do the right thing?

Lest this all sound dour, Lee keeps things remarkably light. Primary colours pop in Matthew Libatique’s cinematography, and composer Howard Drossin keeps the action moving with a snappy score reminiscent of frequent Lee collaborator Terence Blanchard. Some will say the style of Highest 2 Lowest is too light to deal with these topics, but then these people have never seen a Spike Lee movie.

After all, this is the man who soundtracked the crimes of the Son of Sam killer with ABBA and Chic. The soundtrack of Highest 2 Lowest is similarly loaded with hits. When a plan is set in motion to deliver the ransom to the kidnapper on the subway, the journey passes through a Puerto Rican Day Parade, complete with music from La Perfecta legend Eddie Palmieri. Other cameos at this point might cause some eyes to roll, but by this point you’re along for the ride, so a few bumps are forgivable.

Of all the musical influences here, the one that stands out is the performance by rapper A$AP Rocky as the kidnapper, going by the rap name Yung Felon. He exudes menace just barking orders down the phone in the early part of the film, but he takes over the final act, more than holding his own against Washington as he lays out his plans.

Like Lee looking around at the other directors coming up in his wake, Washington’s David observes this young pretender and takes him seriously. He’s too charismatic and focused to ignore, just like Washington was, and still is. His reckoning with the would-be kidnapper is in keeping with Lee’s concerns. The new generation is here, and the old hands are duty-bound to pass the baton. Highest 2 Lowest does just that in fine style. The new kids have energy to spare, but Lee and Washington show there’s life in the old dogs yet.

Highest 2 Lowest premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 19, 2025. The film will be released in select US theatres on August 22, 2025 and globally on Apple TV+ on September 5.