Spike Lee and Denzel Washington are a cinematic pairing on par with Scorsese and De Niro, and after nearly 20 years, they are finally back on screen in Highest 2 Lowest. Lee brings his signature style back to New York City for the first time in over a decade of feature directing, and the results are as exciting as they are confounding. This is a movie of major highs and lows, with some choices that hold back what could have been a masterpiece, and others that reaffirm Lee as one of our most visionary directors working today. It is a contradictory, stylish, frustrating mess.
The film is a modern, New York set reimagining of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 classic, High and Low, following Washington as a wealthy music mogul navigating a dilemma after his son is kidnapped by a stranger demanding a hefty ransom. Washington is joined by Jeffrey Wright as his close friend and faces off against ASAP Rocky, in a truly impressive performance, as the kidnapper who has threatened his family.
Highest 2 Lowest isn’t the first time Lee has taken on a remake of a popular international movie. In 2013, Lee released a remake of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, a 2003 South Korean revenge thriller. Oldboy was more or less a direct remake—redundant, stale, and lacking Lee’s vision. For all its faults, Highest 2 Lowest avoids being a simple transposition. The film is not a remake but a reimagining. High and Low is used as a framework, a starting point, but this adaptation refuses to stay in those lines, for better or worse.
What is most notably absent from this reimagining is the sharp commentary on class divide that runs through Kurosawa’s masterpiece. Highest 2 Lowest replaces this throughline with a half-baked thematic core built on the push-pull between art and commerce in the music industry. Hustle culture brushes against creativity. Do you need followers and hits, or do you need to make whatever your heart tells you to make? This is what Highest 2 Lowest says it is about, but the film explores this idea merely on the surface.
Washington is held back by a character that the movie refuses to depict as morally ambiguous. He has one central dilemma thrown at him, relating to the large ransom demanded by his son’s kidnapper. The weight of his decision, his hesitance to do the right thing, is hit on for about ten minutes before the film races past David’s conflicted interiority and never questions his motivations or morality again. This choice leads Highest 2 Lowest in a surprisingly conservative direction, a disappointing result from a filmmaker who once wore his bold political provocations as a badge of honor.
Thematic incongruity is not the only thing that holds Highest 2 Lowest back, as Lee and the creative team settled on some strange filmmaking decisions that feel at odds with the tone of the story. Most significant in this regard is the music, a melodramatic piano-and-strings-driven score that drowns out the quieter scenes and clashes with the more dynamic set pieces. The editing is as snappy and form-breaking as ever, but the film still runs long and feels disjointed in its pacing. Highest 2 Lowest is one of Lee’s messier movies but still maintains a strong visual identity.
Lee’s direction of his cast is the film’s strongest suit. Washington continues to prove why he is one of the absolute best actors working today. Wright’s steady hand is always reliable, and he is used especially well here. But the real surprise is ASAP Rocky, who has only appeared in a few minor parts over the years. Here, he steps into his most substantial role yet, going head-to-head with Washington in a few scenes, one of which is a music-centric reimagining of High and Low’s climactic scene that stands out as the strongest sequence of this remake. If there’s one thing to take away from Highest 2 Lowest, it is that ASAP Rocky’s future as a screen performer is looking very bright.
A major albatross around this film’s neck is that next to no one is able to see it in theaters right now. A24 and Apple Studios, the two co-producers and distributors of Highest 2 Lowest, decided on an extremely limited theatrical rollout. If Washington’s star power is not enough for these studios to see this as worthy of a wide release, think of how hard that fight must be for movies with no bankable stars or seasoned directors at the helm. Lee deserves better, Washington deserves better, and the audience deserves better.
Spike Lee is a singular storyteller, and even when Highest 2 Lowest goes off the rails, it always feels like a true, fresh Spike Lee joint. The strength of the performances is enough to make the film worthwhile, and fans of Kurosawa’s original will see a lot of interesting points of comparison and contrast between the two. This isn’t the masterpiece that Kurosawa’s was, but it also was never really trying to be that movie. If you have missed Lee’s New York, it is alive and well here.
6 out of 10
Highest 2 Lowest is in theaters now in a limited release and will be available exclusively on AppleTV+ on September 5, 2025.
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This article appears in Aug 1-31, 2025.