Spike Lee loves fanfare. So many of the films in the director’s career begin with some sort of rousing opening-credits sequence: the “Fight the Power” dance that introduces Do the Right Thing, the thumping Bollywood number that kicks off Inside Man. But his song choice for Highest 2 Lowest, his latest effort, has a particular air of top-of-the-world triumph. As the camera circles around a glassy skyscraper in Downtown Brooklyn, “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” from the musical Oklahoma! trills on the soundtrack. Living in a fabulous suite atop this edifice is the music producer David King, played by Lee’s longtime collaborator Denzel Washington, who surveys his borough with wily confidence.
Highest 2 Lowest is a remake of High and Low, a 1960s masterpiece by Akira Kurosawa, and Lee’s version broadly retains the story’s structure and hook, in which an over-leveraged businessman thinks his son has been kidnapped for ransom, then realizes his chauffeur’s son was taken instead. But although Lee and Alan Fox, the film’s screenwriter, tweak the story in contemporary directions, they also seem to be pumping the film with a bit of self-aware satire. Lee introduced cinemagoers to an entirely different perspective on Brooklyn with his 1986 debut feature, She’s Gotta Have It; his protagonist was an effortlessly cool artist, also living on the Downtown Brooklyn waterfront. Almost 40 years later, the location remains the same, but the artist’s loft has transformed into a luxury high-rise occupied by an impeccably tailored executive.
Lee is poking a little fun at himself—the Brooklyn renegade on the art scene who has become a respected veteran. In reuniting with Washington for a fifth time—and for the first time since 2006’s Inside Man—Lee is casting one of his defining creative partners as a similarly venerated figure who is at risk of turning stale. King lives a fabulous life that’s somewhat removed from the real world; he still produces hip music, but his record label is about to be folded into a larger conglomerate. Lee is posing the question: What happens when a tastemaker is at risk of going to seed? Is there any way to reclaim his cool? The answer is yes, but in order to do so, he’ll have to live through a hard-boiled hostage thriller and be reminded of the people who exist beneath his condo building.
When the film begins, King already has some sense that his cachet is slipping away. He’s scheming to undermine the acquisition of his label by buying it himself, committing all of his resources to a foolhardy plan in the name of creative integrity. As this plan spins into motion, though, he’s told his teenage son has been kidnapped—and then realizes that his son is safe, but the son of his chauffeur, Paul (Jeffrey Wright), is missing instead. The first chunk of Highest 2 Lowest mulls this odd moral dilemma: whether King should pony up the massive ransom demanded for someone who isn’t family. He decides to, which kicks another twist-and-turning plot into motion as King and the NYPD officers on the case try to track down the kidnapper.
This is a film that extends beyond the traditional three acts, told with the same shaggy style that has defined a lot of Lee’s recent features (including the fantastic Da 5 Bloods and the Oscar-winning BlacKkKlansman). The first chunk of Highest 2 Lowest is undoubtedly the weakest, a mess of exposition and choppy editing told with such chaos that I almost started to wonder if it was intentional; perhaps Lee is trying to drop us into the discombobulated King’s mindset, especially once the character is struggling with the stress of so many threatening, anonymous phone calls. Planned or not, that mess is smoothed out as the film proceeds, and Washington’s performance goes from languorous and dazed to razor-sharp and darkly humorous—reminiscent of the work he’s done for Lee in the past.
The ransom-exchange sequence that comes in the middle of the film, set on a train car crowded with Yankees fans while a Puerto Rican music festival takes place underneath the subway, is the kind of bravura New York City electricity only Lee knows how to capture. The latter half of Highest 2 Lowest maintains that energy, plunging King into the Bronx projects as he endeavors to come face-to-face with the kidnapper, played with charismatic menace by A$AP Rocky. Here, Lee gets at the crux of his self-satire, as well as the grousing anti-capitalism of Kurosawa’s original movie, in which the protagonist has also let business cloud his moral judgment. The kidnapper isn’t the hero of the story, but he’s angry for the right reasons, someone ignored by society who’s furiously demanding the sympathy of others in the only way he knows how.
For all its initial sloppiness, there’s enough Spike Lee magic in Highest 2 Lowest to justify a trip to the cinema, especially because it will likely be in theaters for only a few weeks; the film debuts on Apple TV+’s streaming service in September. It’s a movie that gleefully kicks its characters out of their comfy environs to plunge them into New York’s rattling, noisy crowds—and it’s worth watching with the biggest audience you can find.
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