The least satisfying Spike Lee film I’ve ever seen, Highest 2 Lowest at least has the excuse that it’s Spike Lee in gun for hire mode. Walter Salles, Mike Nicholls and Martin Scorsese were all lined up to direct at various points. It’s mystifying, though, because Lee’s journeyman work is usually better than this.
It’s a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, or so the blurbs say. In fact Lee and adapter Alan Fox seem in a hurry to work through Kurosawa’s scenarios, as if they had a more urgent appointment elsewhere. If they did, they’re not telling us what it is.
In other words, if you want to see a really good film about an ethical dilemma and what a human life is worth in hard currency, go to Kurosawa, or the Ed McBain novel King’s Ransom, which is what Kurosawa was working from.
The rough shape remains – a rich man’s son is abducted and he agrees to pay the huge ransom, no questions asked. Then, in the twist that makes the plot fascinating, the “kidnapped” son returns. He hadn’t been kidnapped at all and it turns out the kidnappers have taken the wrong person, the son of the rich man’s childhood friend, now employed as his driver. The kidnappers, unfazed, demand the same amount of money for the chauffeur’s son. The rich guy will still pay up, for the sake of his friend’s son, won’t he?
Originally the rich guy was a shoe executive and there was a lot of plot hoo-hah about him trying to take control of the company at the same time as dealing with the demands of the criminals. Lee’s film has him as a music biz guy, the “best ears in the business” who built his record company from the street up and is now being tempted – Succession-style – to sell out to Big Music. In their fifth outing together, Denzel Washington is Lee’s dithering hero, a boomer poised on the edge of irrelevance who wants to show the world he still has what it takes.
Opposite him, Jeffrey Wright as the old friend. A powerhouse duo, you’d have thought. And for a while, a handful of minutes, Washington and Wright are able to work up some dramatic magic together, in the scenes where David (Washington) and Paul (Wright) are engaging with each other father to father, man to man, friend to friend and employer to employee – highest 2 lowest.
That said, there is also grim stuff in here. The scene where David asks portraits of Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Wonder what they would do in his situation. Later, a toe-curler between David and kidnapper Yung Felon (played by Rakim Mayers aka A$AP Rocky), a dismal “the old guy still has it” rap battle in a deserted recording studio, in which the younger man is schooled and the analogue world bests the digital.
What’s frustrating is how the whole thing sparks into life now and again, promising so much and yet not delivering. Rocky is particularly good, though it’s a terrible role. And Lee does make it atmospheric when David and Paul decide to take the fight to the kidnappers and the film shifts into the sort of flavoursome neo-noir that Carl Franklin worked up 30 years ago in Devil in a Blue Dress (which also starred Washington).
There’s also a slight return to the thought landscape of Bamboozled, Lee’s most divisive movie, in the opposing characters of David and Yung Felon. Is a rich black dude still really black? Why does black equal hood? And so on. Though Lee’s thoughts on race this time around feel like filler, as does almost every aspect of the film.
Highest 2 Lowest – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2025
