A Welcome Reunion for Spike and Denzel

Anyone who drives a car in New York City with any frequency knows the enormous condo building that looms over the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge. Driving north on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway toward the bridge, you can’t miss it. That is surely by design. You don’t build (and you don’t live in) a 33-story tower of curved glass and steel like the Olympia Dumbo if you want to maintain a low profile.

I drive along that stretch of the BQE sometimes. When I do, I often look up at the Olympia and wonder “What sort of person lives there?” Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest posits an answer. In the film, the building’s penthouse apartment is occupied by Denzel Washington’s David King, a record-label mogul who once ruled the music business. But if King’s magic touch for discovering talent faded in recent years, you wouldn’t know it from his magnificent home in the Olympia, which is adorned with Basquiats and what looks like a fragment of the old Ebbets Field scoreboard. The image of Washington closing deals over the phone from a balcony 400 feet above New York Harbor, with the Downtown Manhattan skyline rising in the distance, calls to mind that famous line from The Lion King: Everything the light touches is his kingdom.

That’s where Highest 2 Lowest begins, although, as the title suggests, King will soon take a journey into and below New York’s streets after his luck takes a distinct turn for the worse. Lee’s film updates Akira Kurosawa’s famous moral thriller High and Low (itself loosely based on an Ed McBain novel) for a modern world of viral videos and social media. Unimpressed by online influencers and wary of private equity ownership, King wants to buy back control of his valuable but struggling record label, Stackin’ Hits. (In an amusing Kurosawa homage, the company looking to snatch the label away from King is named Stray Dog.)

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Right as King puts his takeover plan in motion he’s the victim of a terrible crime — or so it seems. Kidnappers try to take King’s teenage son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) in order to hold him ransom for $17.5 million. Instead, they accidentally grab Trey’s friend Kyle (Elijah Wright), who also happens to be the son of King’s driver and confidant Paul (Jeffrey Wright). The kidnappers quickly learn their mistake, then demand King fork over the ransom anyway. Paying it could destroy King’s finances, along with his plan to get his company back. But not paying could ruin his reputation with the public and turn him into a pariah.

It’s an ideal no-win situation for a gritty crime story, which probably explains why it has been remade on multiple occasions across various media. Bringing Kurosawa’s tale into 2025 New York City gives Lee the opportunity to roam the Big Apple from its tallest buildings to its grimiest underground recording studios, and to make another film like his great 2006 policier Inside Man (also starring Washington) about a similar battle between haves and have nots. It also affords Lee the chance to reunite with Washington for the first time since Inside Man, which lends Highest 2 Lowest even more metatextual meaning.

I don’t expect Highest 2 Lowest to replace Inside Man, or any of Lee and Washington’s other prior collaborations, in the minds of their fans. Truth be told, it takes a while for this movie to find its footing. It develops in the exact opposite direction of its title; the opening scenes are its weakest, with Washington looking a little disengaged from King’s familial entanglements with his concerned wife (Ilfenesh Hadera) and his complex business dealings with his greedy partner (Michael Potts). Perhaps Washington’s low-key choices in these scenes were designed to reflect the character’s complacent, above-it-all lifestyle. Either way, it’s not until the kidnapping plot goes into motion, and Washington begins verbally sparring with the shadowy kidnapper (A$AP Rocky), that Highest 2 Lowest really starts cooking.

Washington and Rocky’s scenes are flat-out electric. Even when they’re just talking over the phone, there’s an intensity to their scenes sorely lacking from everything that precedes them. In fact, Rocky brings so much passion to his scenes that Washington actually has to level up his own game up to keep pace. The pair’s confrontations prove to be Highest 2 Lowest’s high points.

The movie builds momentum all through its second and third acts, as Rocky’s voice on the phone demands King personally deliver the ransom during a trip on the 4 train from Bowling Green to Yankee Stadium. What follows is a whopper of a chase sequence involving subways, motorcycles, police cruisers, Puerto Rican Day celebrations, and rowdy Yankee fans. More impressively, Lee manages to maintain that same level of tension as the story shifts into its final act, and King follows the clues to uncover the truth behind this crime.

As he so often does, Spike Lee makes stellar use of real New York locations here, including the condo building in Dumbo and the actual New York City subway. (If you’ve ever taken a packed train to or from a professional sporting event, you will recognize the true-to-life energy Lee captured here.) The man knows this city inside and out; nobody creates New York movies quite like him at this point — although at times the overwhelming authenticity of the setting almost undermines the less fully realized aspects of the story, namely the inner workings of King’s business and the battle for control of its board. Those scenes (including one featuring Wendell Pierce in a small role) never comes close to matching the suspense generated by King’s internal struggle over what to do about the kidnapping, or his battle of wills with Rocky’s character once he makes his choice.

Of course, it’s possible to read Highest 2 Lowest’s business drama in a less literal way; to see it as an allegory about filmmakers like Lee and Washington nearing the final phase of their careers, who have endured unprecedented upheaval in the entertainment industry and don’t quite recognize the world around them anymore. The movie talks a lot about how King possesses “the best ears in the biz” — an unparalleled skill for finding and nurturing artists — and how such human gifts are increasingly devalued in a world dominated by algorithms and artificial intelligence.

Highest 2 Lowest’s final act attempts to reassert the importance of God-given gifts like King’s — and, one could argue, Lee’s and Washington’s. But as the film reminds viewers, those who’ve reached the apex of their art don’t stay there forever unless they keep breaking new ground. There’s always someone young and hungry waiting at the bottom, looking for a way to get to the top themselves.

RATING: 7/10