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Spike Lee is back in New York City, and he’s brought Denzel Washington with him. Their reunion—Washington as David King, a powerful record executive with a gilded life in Brooklyn—anchors Lee’s “Highest 2 Lowest,” a reinterpretation of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 masterpiece “High and Low.” Where Kurosawa channeled postwar Japan’s anxieties, Lee steers the story toward America’s bruising debates over power, privilege, money, and morality.
David King has cracked the code in America. He’s at once family man and music mogul, living in a sleek Brooklyn high-rise that gazes across the East River. The apartment is punctuated with paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kehinde Wiley—art choices that telegraph both King’s cultural capital and his self-image as an immortal fixture of African American excellence. The view itself is cinematic: sunrise turns Manhattan into a field of glowing gold; nighttime transforms it into a jeweled skyline. This is a world built on success, though also, as Lee slyly suggests, on the back of gentrification.
“Highest 2 Lowest” is, at heart, a film about wealth versus want. Lee, an Oscar-winning filmmaker long attuned to how larger social systems press down on the individual, frames it as a taut urban thriller and moral inquiry. The question reverberates across the story: what does it actually mean to be “good” in a society stacked with compromises? And yes—the phrase “Do the Right Thing” hovers knowingly in the background.
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Lee collaborates here with cinematographer Matthew Libatique (“Black Swan,” “A Star Is Born”) to give us the razor-sharp city through David’s perspective. The life matches the city: glossy, rigorous, controlled. His wife Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera) radiates poise within this rarefied world. David, meanwhile, is magnetic, charming, a man so confident he barely seems to sweat—even under pressure. Until the call comes.
That call: his teenage son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) has allegedly been kidnapped. The ransom demand lands hard, severe, unshakable. Quickly, however, both David and the audience learn the abduction itself has gone off-script—rattling the entire framework of King’s carefully protected empire.
What Lee is adapting is no footnote. “Highest 2 Lowest” traces its source to Kurosawa’s “High and Low,” itself an adaptation of Ed McBain’s 1959 crime novel “King’s Ransom.” Kurosawa’s version starred the towering Toshiro Mifune as an executive on the brink of corporate victory, thrown into crisis by a kidnapping. For a modern filmmaker to tackle Kurosawa—one of cinema’s most revered stylists and storytellers—requires not just technical command but fortitude. Lee, as he’s done before with classics running from Shakespeare to “Oldboy,” reclaims and recontextualizes the material for a distinctly American, distinctly African American lens.
Washington’s David King is not just a father—he’s also scheming to regain his record label, an empire that once landed him in glossy magazine spreads (remember those?). But time has marched past him, and the glory has slipped. Lee literally stages King “on high” in the film’s first act—balconies, penthouses, patriarchal control—before undercutting that privilege. When Pam wants to write a charitable check, King refuses, asserting ownership of money as power. Even when Trey raises his voice, David’s calm, unnervingly quiet responses suggest a man with rage lurking just beneath the surface.
Around him, we see powerful masculine dynamics at work. Wendell Pierce appears as a loyal business associate, while Jeffrey Wright brings grace and moral ballast as Paul, the family chauffeur. Wright’s work here, delicately layered and unshowy, once again cements him as one of our finest actors.
Lee then pries King out of his insulated bubble, pushing him back into contact with the city’s cultural ecosystem. Cameos from Rosie Perez, Anthony Ramos, legendary salsa musician Eddie Palmieri, and even A$AP Rocky remind us that success has isolated King from his community—until crisis drags him back.
It’s a bold move for any director to rework Kurosawa, but Lee thrives on this kind of cultural collision. His version makes the moral weight hyper-contemporary: money drags on conscience, and accountability presses down until even success feels like a trap.
“Highest 2 Lowest” is gripping, stylish, and deeply felt. It challenges the audience to ask: if doing the right thing costs everything, is it still possible? And it just may inspire viewers to revisit Kurosawa’s “High and Low”—which, sixty years on, still holds up as one of cinema’s greatest social thrillers.
“Highest 2 Lowest”
Rated R for gun violence and language.
Running time: 2 hours 13 minutes.
In theaters; streaming on Apple TV+ starting Sept. 5.
Directed by Spike Lee
Writers: Evan Hunter, Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, Ryûzô Kikushima, Eijirô Hisaita
Starring Denzel Washington, Ilfenesh Hadera, Aubrey Joseph, Jeffrey Wright, Wendell Pierce, Rosie Perez, Anthony Ramos
Genres: Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller
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