REEL | Denzel Washington and Spike Lee Kidnap 'Highest 2 Lowest'

"All money ain't good money!"

Apple Original Films / A24

Legendary African-American cinematic duo, director Spike Lee and star Denzel Washington, reteam for their fifth film collaboration in the virtuosic English-language neo-noir crime thriller remake of Akira Kurosawa's moralistic 1963 Japanese police procedural, High and Low, itself loosely adapted from American author Evan McBain's mystery novel King's Ransom. Highest 2 Lowest supercharges its own fresh Black touches about being removed from the culture you helped build after the isolation of immense success.

Set in the world of the declining music industry instead of shoe manufacturing, Washington embodies an aging hotshot record label music mogul, David King, looking to regain his status as a famous hitmaker when a plot to kidnap and ransom his teenage son goes awry in and around the boroughs of Brooklyn and the Bronx. Around him, Jeffrey Wright as his right-hand man and Ilfenesh Hadera as his entrepreneurial wife build King's character before these complications chip away at his core and public image.

Screenwriter Alan Fox's script starts slow with some belaboured police procedural elements about process, business, and logistics most viewers are already intimately familiar with. However, when the ransom plotline ultimately pays off and A$AP Rocky enters the film in earnest as a troubled former inmate turned aspiring rapper, Lee's film becomes electric with excitement. How Rocky becomes entangled with the King family, the handover and recovery of the $17.5 million ransom, is when the real fun of their back-and-forth builds.

Lee and Washington's upbeat redo of the classic moral tale of class, capitalism, wealth, and ego is an exciting but tricky experience. When its energy is high, the film's verve soars, but it skips when the impossible situations depicted struggle to resolve narratively in tidy ways. Highest 2 Lowest's biggest misstep is its initial sense of intense melodrama, often heightened by an occasionally but truly distracting musical score by film composer Howard Drossin.

Highest 2 Lowest screens at the Rio Theatre and will be available to stream on Apple TV+ starting September 5th.


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