When the news broke that Spike Lee and Denzel Washington were reuniting, I imagine half of New York felt that pulse of anticipation: the sort of glee you reserve for a holiday, or spotting Brando’s name in a cast list again. What could go wrong with this pairing? Everything, it turns out—at least, in that most poignant way of contemporary American filmmaking, where the result is less artistic combustion and more accidental kitchen sink fire.
Highest 2 Lowest arrives with a neon banner of expectations: it’s an English-language remake of Kurosawa’s peerless High and Low, now parachuted into the Brooklyn music business, and helmed by a director who’s never met a camera move—or, for that matter, a “message”—he didn’t want to jazz up. When you read the logline—kidnapping, high stakes, Denzel in the heart of the rap industry—you think of thrills, intrigue, an atom-bomb of a moral crossroads. But Spike’s latest is a sampler platter of moods and misfires, with every sequence chasing its own tail, some moments sticking only because they’re so bizarre you want to ask for a replay.
For every pleasure here (and yes, there are a few—there always are, with these men), there are two flubs. The entire first hour feels like residency at the DMV: endless, deadening, and punctuated by snatches of dialogue so arch and soggy you wonder if Spike Jackson Pollock-ed the script across the page. The score, a hodgepodge of elevator jazz and shuffling iPod randomness, is laid over scenes so indifferently that you spend the film’s first half amused at your own confusion. Why, Spike, does a face-off over a child’s life sound like halftime on a cruise ship?
It wants to say things about the industry—the self-insert director critiquing the scene, the capital swirling, fathers disappointing sons with equal measures of neglect and cash. The resemblance to Megalopolis is more than passing: here, the mirror held up to the business is less Orson Welles than TikTok in echo, but at least the self-insert (for once) is likable, and Spike spaces the self-serious grandstanding with some welcomed goofiness.
Still, good luck surviving the film’s opening traipse through plot and personality. The supporting cast (minus an underused Ice Spice and the ever-reliable Dean Winters) delivers performances so wooden they could be thrown on a fire in Prospect Park. Denzel, somehow, cuts through this with the vigor of an actor half his age—he banters and broods with that slow-burn charisma, his eyes perpetually scanning for an angle, and it's only when A$AP Rocky arrives that his energy finally finds a dance partner. Suddenly, you sense what the movie wants to be: part heist, part redemption, part pop musical, held together by spit and surprise.
The subway ransom scene is a rare, electric jolt—Spike’s camera finally remembering it can move with urban music, the cross-cutting frenetic without tipping into chaos. It makes you lament anew the rest of the picture: if only the runtime didn’t sag like an overburdened bridge, or the tone didn’t swing from social critique to Sunday cartoon, maybe Highest 2 Lowest would live up even halfway to its inspirations. There are fun moments—especially in Denzel and Rocky’s first real face-off, and the handover sequence crackles with the comic-book energy of Inside Man—but these highlights vanish into an endless parade of limp filler and tonal lurches.
What’s frustrating is not just that this is the latest in the Hollywood Referendum on Pointless Remakes—though it is, resoundingly—but that the scattershot pleasures convince you it could have worked, given even a modicum of editing discipline and some actual restraint. The ransom handoff, for instance, is as exhilarating as anything Spike’s filmed since 25th Hour, so why does the film keep returning to its most stultifying, talky set-pieces as if it’s sleepwalking?
And let me be generous: A$AP Rocky’s scenes supply the film with more joy—and reckless charisma—than I could reasonably have anticipated. He gets to be the mythic foil the rest of the film prevaricates about, and his final confrontation with Denzel is the kind of pulpy, unlikely spectacle I didn’t know I was missing from summer movies. At least the original song works—somehow fresher than most of the film around it.
But for all the flashes of fun, the mediocrity burrows in. The first hour is nearly unwatchable; the acting manages to underperform even when no one is being asked for much; many of the “high” notes (pun intended) are drowned in self-sabotage. There’s an infectious likeability here, true, and an idea or two that still sing. But mostly, this is a tonally confused, wearisome muddle—Pointless Remake #209—padded far past its breaking point. If I could pay Spike Lee $17.5 million to stop using the soundtrack the way a toddler plays with their mom’s phone, I would. As it is, Highest 2 Lowest coasts along on Denzel’s relentless warmth and the strains of a couple sharp scenes, doomed to the lower rungs of its director’s filmography, neither high nor low—merely lost, somewhere in between.
