Titled like a sequel, plotted like a remake, and shot with sufficient of its personal singular verve to make sure that most individuals by no means consider it as both of these issues, Spike Lee’s deliriously entertaining — if jarringly upbeat — “Highest 2 Lowest” modernizes the post-war anxieties of Akira Kurosawa’s “Excessive and Low” for the age of parasocial relationships.
Previously a hyper-capitalistic shoe magnate embodied by the wolfish Toshiro Mifune, Kingo Gondo has been reborn as report government David King (Denzel Washington, in what may be his most towering display efficiency since “Coaching Day”). Likewise, the glass mansion his progenitor owned atop the hills of Yokohama has been swapped out for a penthouse condominium on the Olympia constructing in Dumbo — quickly to turn out to be a minor vacationer attraction if this refreshing late summer time deal with is seen extensively sufficient throughout the two-week theatrical run that can precede its disappearance into the annals of Apple TV+.
Past that, nonetheless, the fundamental chords of the music stay the identical as they had been again in 1963, even when Lee features a bit extra screaming instantly into the digital camera about how a lot Boston’s sports activities groups suck than I keep in mind there being in Kurosawa’s take. As soon as once more, our protagonist is compelled right into a compromising place on the eve of a essential enterprise deal when a downtrodden kidnapper errors his driver’s son for his personal child, Trey (Aubrey Joseph). And as soon as once more, all the cash on the earth can’t save him from paying a value for his greed.
The world is a really completely different place than it was 60 years in the past, however some issues by no means change; when folks lose hope, they nonetheless flip towards the individuals who gave it to them. Solely now, the cash-strapped kidnapper doesn’t should bodily lookup on the wealthy man’s fort in an effort to be taunted by his fortune (though Lee makes certain to incorporate a scene the place the legal does that anyway). Within the model of the story that screenwriter William Alan Fox has reworked for 2025, the unhealthy man might not be capable of spy his idol and nemesis from his personal condominium in Forest Hills, however he looks like David is personally mocking him each time he seems to be at his telephone.
Even at a time of immense financial stratification, expertise has the ability to make folks’s dream lives appear shut sufficient to succeed in out and seize for themselves, and that closeness is very palpable for a younger Black rapper (A$AP Rocky, simply nearly as good right here as he’s in latest Sundance spotlight “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”), who sees a lot of himself within the multi-millionaire CEO of Stackin’ Hits data. He looks like they know one another already, and that the actual crime is that they don’t.
The reality, nonetheless, is that David King — or King David, as he’s been topped by the New York media — is now not as safe in his throne as he was throughout the pre-Spotify golden age of 2000s hip-hop. Pushing 70 in a younger man’s sport, the hitmaker with “the most effective ears within the enterprise” has been on the point of irrelevance for the previous couple of years, and his dwindling market share has solely led him additional astray from his famously impeccable style. Regardless of promising his spouse Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera, giving beneficent Queen Macbeth) that he’d promote his empire and saunter off into the sundown, David’s wounded satisfaction evokes a determined bid to purchase out his accomplice and get well full possession of the label, and he’ll want each cent he’s acquired in an effort to pull it off. For sure, the most effective ears within the enterprise might not be capable of save David from listening to the worst voices in his head after a kidnapper calls for a $17.5 million ransom for the secure return of his chauffeur’s son.
Solely a lot will be gained from evaluating Lee’s film towards the a lot tenser and extra extreme Kurosawa masterpiece that impressed it (and was itself based mostly on the Evan Hunter novel “King’s Ransom”), however the relationship between David and his driver is without doubt one of the few areas the place “Highest 2 Lowest” clearly comes out on high. If Washington owns each minute of this movie, riveting as he grasps for a righteousness that his cash can’t appear to purchase him, Jeffrey Wright’s heartsick efficiency as David’s greatest pal and closest worker is the friction that provides buy to his character’s inside battle.
Paul grew up with David, however life took him in one other path, and he’s been residing within the King’s penthouse ever since he acquired out of jail. “It’s simply fucking cash!” Trey may insist, however the monetary dependence on the core of his dad’s universe is so apparent that each one of David’s conversations with Paul are silently choked with the concern of acknowledging it, however when David waffles over paying the ransom for Paul’s son (a ransom he was greater than able to pay when he thought his personal son had been nabbed), the unstated fact on the middle of their friendship begins to tear the 2 males aside. Such is the value they pay for making an attempt to faux — as so many individuals do — that cash is by some means in a position to exist and not using a ethical dimension.
The stress between David and Paul retains “Highest 2 Lowest” upright even when the film round it threatens to go slack. Lee doesn’t share Kurosawa’s endurance for lengthy, talky, single-location sequences, and his makes an attempt at Ice Spicing up this comparatively low-event film will be extra bother than they’re value, even when Ice Spice herself is acquitted on all prices for her two seconds of display time.
Onerous cuts, double takes, and unusual cameos are par for the course with Spike, however these affectations are inclined to distract from the primacy of this movie’s performances. Elsewhere, and in every single place, Howard Drossin’s wildly intrusive orchestral rating smothers each second in a wall of sound that burrows into your head like maintain music and refuses to discriminate between moods. That garishness additionally seeps into Matthew Libatique’s digital cinematography, however there it really works to the benefit of this film’s heated sense of panic (not “Do the Proper Factor” or “Summer season of Sam” scorching, however sweltering sufficient to really feel David lose his cool).
Then once more, there isn’t precisely rather a lot to see. Whereas it will be absurd to counsel that Lee’s reimagination doesn’t have its personal vivid sense of place (a well-known sequence, now set aboard the 6 practice because it travels from Borough Corridor to the Bronx, flattens New York Metropolis right into a unified socioeconomic class of Yankees followers), the movie’s normal disinterest in replicating the verticality of Kurosawa’s model takes away from a 3rd act plunge into the kidnapper’s setting.
However Lee is a lot extra attention-grabbing for what he brings to a venture than for what he takes away from it, and “Highest 2 Lowest” is of course at its greatest when it deviates from its supply materials. The movie’s wholehearted embrace of Black tradition is baked into David’s need to guard Stackin’ Hits from consumers who may dilute the model of its historical past, but it surely’s additionally suffused into the assorted adjustments that Lee’s model makes to the story’s third act, which pivots away from the darkness of Japan’s post-war heroin epidemic and in the direction of the aspirational facets of hip-hop. No spoilers, however at a sure level within the film Denzel Washington is compelled to rap for his life. It shouldn’t work, and it positively nearly doesn’t, however director and star alike decide to the bit with the identical depth that they’ve at all times dedicated to one another, and by some means they make it sing.
That’s certainly one of a number of dangers Lee takes in service of creating “Highest 2 Lowest” considerably extra enjoyable and hopeful than any iteration of this story has ever been earlier than — dangers that are all within the service of showcasing, to cite the press notes, “the transcendent energy of music and the loving bonds of a close-knit African American household.” If this story of financial despair and its malcontents doesn’t appear to be it was ever supposed to be a automobile for these messages, Lee doesn’t appear to have gotten the memo, as he eschews the morally ambiguous despair of Kurosawa’s ending in favor of a kumbaya for the richest household on the town. King David will not be the identical bottom-line obsessed despot on the finish of this movie that he was at the beginning, and it’s laborious to swallow the final scene’s glib conclusion that a bit humility is sufficient to make the whole lot proper.
And so Lee’s reinterpretation strains to go away us on a excessive as an alternative of a low, as befits the finale of an replace so compellingly desperate to flip the script on certainly one of Kurosawa’s most cynical movies. It is simply fucking cash, on the finish of the day. However then once more, what isn’t?
Grade: B
“Highest 2 Lowest” premiered on the 2025 Cannes Movie Pageant. A24 will launch it in theaters on Friday, August 22, and will probably be out there to stream on Apple TV beginning Friday, September 5.
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