Highest 2 Lowest (A PopEntertainment.com Movie Review)

PopEntertainment
5 days ago
4 min read

Updated: 16 hours ago

HIGHEST 2 LOWEST (2025)

Starring Denzel Washington, Jeffrey Wright, Ilfenesh Hadera, ASAP Rocky, Ice Spice, Dean Winters, John Douglas Thompson, LaChanze, Aubrey Joseph, Michael Potts, Wendell Pierce, Elijah Wright, Rick Fox, Rod Strickland, Nuri Hazzard, Jensen McRae, Jade Cayne, Imana Breaux, Andy McQueen, Frederick Weller, Eddie Palmieri, Anthony Ramos and Rosie Perez.

Screenplay by Alan Fox.

Directed by Spike Lee.

Distributed by A24. 133 minutes. Rated R.

Highest 2 Lowest is a crime story, but even more so it is director Spike Lee’s love note to music and New York.

Lee works with his five-time leading man Denzel Washington for the first time in nearly 20 years, since the 2006 action film Inside Man. The two had previously worked together on Mo’ Better Blues (1990), Malcolm X (1992) and He Got Game (1998). In fact, Highest 2 Lowest is shockingly the first Spike Lee film to get a theatrical release (a limited three-week run before landing on Apple TV+) since his acclaimed 2018 hit BlacKkKlansman. (Da 5 Bloods was released straight to Netflix during the pandemic of 2020.)

It's probably no surprise that all of the films the two have made together take place mostly, if not completely, in their native areas of New York. (Washington was born in Mt. Vernon, NY, while Lee was born in Atlanta, but raised in Brooklyn.) However, shockingly it has also been over a decade since either of them made a movie in the five boroughs – Red Hook Summer (2012) for Lee, The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 (2009) for Washington.

So, it’s nice to see them back on their home turf, and their love for the area suffuses Highest 2 Lowest.

Highest 2 Lowest is Lee’s loose version of Akira Kurosawa’s classic 1963 Japanese film High and Low, which was itself a loose adaptation of the Ed McBain 1959 crime novel King’s Ransom. (Fun fact: McBain’s novel is one of a series of books which took place in the fictional city of Isola, NY, but it has long been said that Isola was obviously based on New York City, so the story is sort of returning home, too.)

Like I said above, the main story of Highest 2 Lowest is a crime drama, specifically a kidnapping. However, in many ways the kidnapping seems to be secondary to a celebration of the area and music. (It’s not a coincidence that the story continues going for 20 minutes to a half hour after the criminal is caught.)

In fact the crime part of the narrative doesn’t always make sense – at some points it shows a complicated cabal of intertwining collaborators, and yet at other parts it plays like there is just one, rather mistake-prone, instigator of the violence.

Washington plays David King, a rich music producer and record label exec, who has gotten a bit fat and happy with his place in music. He is trying to reinvigorate his mojo by repurchasing his label from the musical conglomerate that he partnered with years earlier, but who now he just sees as a nuisance and a hindrance to his artistic vision.

Just as he is struggling to get the money together to take over his label – and by the way, this is another questionable plot point, just from his home and his lifestyle, King appears to have much more money than this film gives him credit for – he hears that his son has been kidnapped from a basketball camp he is taking.

It quickly turns out that the son is safe. The kidnapper instead grabbed the kid’s best friend, who is also the son of Paul (Jeffrey Wright), who is not only King’s driver but also a good friend to King himself.

Therefore, King has a bit of a conundrum: is he responsible to spend almost all of his money, and effectively ruin the chances of the label sale, for the safe return of a young man who isn’t even his son? Even if it was the son of one of his closest friends, how much is King responsible for getting his release? This pressure is added to by social media, which seems to look at the idea of King not helping as being monstrous, but celebrates the idea of King trying to save his friend’s son.

And, yes, the kidnapping plot is often exciting and well-done, although, again, it doesn’t always make sense as a story. King and Paul end up doing much of the detective work to try to find the kidnapper and get back his $17 million dollars, mostly because the NY cops – with the exception of one female cop played by LaChanze – all seem to be pretty incompetent. (I love Dean Winters as a comic actor, but after the Allstate “mayhem” commercials, he’s a bit hard to take seriously as a legitimate character.)

However, the movie seems more interested in the reinvigoration of King, his return to the love of his art, the love of his home, the love of his family and friends. This is the smart call narratively.

Highest 2 Lowest is an imperfect film, but it’s a very likable one. I hope it doesn’t take another 20 years for Spike and Denzel to get back together.

Jay S. Jacobs