Divalicious Review! Spike Lee’s Reimagines A Kurosawa Classic in ‘Highest 2 Lowest’
By Caroline Cao | September 4, 2025 | Celebrity & Culture
Highest 2 Lowest begins with deception. With a monumental needle drop of “Oh What A Beautiful Morning” and power shots of New York City, the camera zooms in on Denzel Washington, as millionaire music mogul David King, in the midst of a business phone call on the balcony of his NYC penthouse apartment.
Something is worming beneath the surface of this tale of a businessman trying to save the music industry. He’s betting his life on it, too. He’s mortgaged his place and taken loans. The stakes are high around this. With his trusty street-connected assistant Christopher Paul (Jeffrey Wright), his business plan is to continue finding new breakout talent and prevent the company from resorting to generative AI slop.
And then the shots take a distance from Washington. He receives a phone call. A mysterious caller (ASAP Rocky) announces that his son has been kidnapped from basketball camp. Like any good parent, David is ready to pay whatever it takes to get his son back. Only, there’s also a mix-up. It’s his assistant’s son, played by Elijah Wright, that’s been kidnapped. That’s when the film becomes a bit of a dilemma.
“I’m not paying for a kidnapper’s mistake,” David insists. But his son also brings up that not paying and letting anything bad happen to his friend could be a reputational problem. And the film offers a forensic lens on this conundrum. It’s up to the audience to decide whether he’s acting on the reputational cost or the moral one, even when both ego and nobleness co-exist.
Unless you have been acquainted with Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 classic procedural thriller High and Low, which Highest 2 Lowest riffs on, you wouldn’t guess where Highest 2 Lowest goes. Spike Lee’s remake begins as almost an inspirational-drama kind of note, until it becomes a soap-thriller of sorts. These are, in fact, the lows of it, unless you believe it’s part of Lee’s calculation.
Because then, the highs: Highest 2 Lowest builds up to the most monumental action, interspersed with grainy documentary footage, as if the NYC historical scene of parades and subways crammed with baseball fans becomes its own force of nature. When the action dives into a Puerto Rico pride celebration, the diegetic music energizes the chase. It’s electrifying and naturalistic to the mise-en-scène.
The third act becomes poignant in its unexpected turns when David realizes that the kidnapper also seems to hold a mirror to him, about his soul, about why he was seen this way, to the point where he speaks somewhere as a stern surrogate father, even when chasing him down.
In the first hour, Highest 2 Lowest is pedestrian by comparison to otherLee works and relies on its great performances, particularly Washington’s, to keep you engaged. Now, it may start in the lows at first, but when it rises, it rises. Lee’s latest should ideally be viewed in a theater.
Highest 2 Lowest will be available on Apple TV+ on September 5.
Photo credit: Apple TV+
