Film Review: Highest 2 Lowest (2025)

Like so many of his other films, Spike Lee’s latest joint, Highest 2 Lowest, is a pastiche of a bunch of different films; a by-the-numbers crime thriller, a nuanced reflection on his place as a Black artist, a thunderously dull reflection on class and privilege. And like many of Lee’s movies, Highest 2 Lowest is occasionally brilliant and kinetic – and a few too many other places, incredibly blunt and ineffective. At its best, it is a fascinating character study driven by a typically terrific Denzel Washington performance – and at its worst, Highest 2 Lowest is a one-dimensional story that feels like a Lee-flavored Kurosawa adaptation funneled through a rejected Empire episode plot.

In that way, there’s no denying the artistry of Lee, in his first collaboration with Washington since 2009’s phenomenal Inside Man, in a film that sees him pulling inspiration from everything from Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (which this film is considered a “reinterpretation” of; most of that reinterpretation comes in the film’s second half) to some of the lesser parts of his one endeavor into virtual filmmaking, the ever-iconic, infamously awful NBA 2K16 Career Mode story (which was officially called “Livin’ the Dream”). Highest 2 Lowest, like many of Lee’s films, focuses on a man at a crossroads with himself; in this instance, David King, an iconic music mogul credited with bringing Black culture into the new millennium, who now finds himself looking at an industry ready to live what’s left of its soul behind (want to know how Lee feels about AI? Like many things in this film, his observations are blunt and obvious).

King’s initial conflict – whether he is going to sell his record label to IP-hungry shareholders or not – is, unsurprisingly, the most personal, reflective part of the film, always contrasting the images of famous Black athletes and artists on the walls of the King home with his protagonist struggling with his own iconic contributions to American culture; what happens when culture, or sports, or music, recognizes your influence, but begins to leave you behind? How does someone continue to find passion in what they do, when everything gets bigger, faster, and cheaper, and mostly just feels like a carbon copy of something else done before? It’s clear Lee, through his depiction of King’s actions in the film, struggles with this idea – an idea that even leaks into his rather unsubtle depiction of class, seen best when King and his limo driver Paul Christopher (Jeffrey Wright, always terrific) find themselves in the center of a kidnapping investigation, first for King’s son, but then Christopher’s, when it is discovered the kidnappers made a mistake.

Once the kidnapping happens, Highest 2 Lowest slowly begins to lose its focus, eventually devolving into an utter mess of dichotomous stylistic and thematic choices, injecting familiar Lee tropes (characters speaking to the camera, strange-but-consistent editing patterns, lots of very distinct, formal blocking in static shots) into a rather unexciting police drama. It’s here where Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest languishes the longest, the script spastically moving from its nascent observations on the working class (every cop treats Paul like shit, and King with kid gloves) to King’s internal, more Biblical conflict, then to a movie reflecting on the nature of virality, cults of attention, and in some of its best moments, how one finds truth amongst the dishonorably inauthentic masses.

(Can I also note Howard Drossin’s score is weirdly generic, and incredibly annoying? At times, it felt like that old Family Guy sketch about the Italian trumpet. It’s real strange at times).

But as Highest 2 Lowest slowly descends from the looming towers of Dumbo Olympia, into the streets, tunnels, and ground-level apartments, Lee’s adaptation veers sharply away from its source material, replacing the angst and spiritual freedom experienced by Gondo in the original 1963 film, into something safer and more self-aggrandizing than one might hope. As one might expect, King David eventually comes face-to-face with the young rapper-turned-kidnapper who was but a mysterious voice for most of the film – A$AP Rocky, doing the most he can with a two-scene performance full of tone-deaf dialogue – in a scene set in a music studio that I can only describe as one of the most fascinating combinations of strong performances and cringy-worthy dialogue I can imagine (small spoiler: David and Yung Felon have a quasi-battle rap).

Strangely enough, where the film ultimately ends almost feels like a betrayal of Kurosawa’s warnings of hubris and the isolationism of wealth, in how it resolves the deeper, inner conflicts it suggest David struggles with throughout the film. Though some of it surfaces in Washington’s incredibly layered, energized performance of his Shakespearian protagonist, the film’s text feels like Lee reluctantly pulling up the ladder from the coming generation of artists, insistent to double down on what he knows, simply because that’s the only way he knows how. As one of the few artists iconic enough to define their own image and legacy, it ultimately makes Highest 2 Lowest one of the strangest, artistically limited third acts in all of Lee’s oeuvre (excluding She Hate Me, of course).

Highest 2 Lowest is, like many of Lee’s 21st century offerings, a bunch of different films in a bunch of different conversations with itself, its creator, and its audience, weaving its character arcs through overtly-placed societal reflections and a narrative that runs the gamut from intriguing to maddening, from thoughtful to ludicrous, sometimes in the course of a single scene (also it has but two middling female characters, an unfortunate aspect of oh so many Lee projects). Even its formal composition, from its shifts in color grading and editing at different points of the film, feel characteristically Lee, riding a thin line from being sublimely reflective and overly referential, alternating between maddening and seductive with each progressive scene and jump cut (how Lee films and cuts moments of affection and human touch in this movie are particularly jarring and odd, for example).

And though I quite like Lee’s filmmaking, and can’t deny the gravitas Washington can still build out of a short monologue or a subtle interaction, Highest 2 Lowest feels too blunt and miscalibrated to have any real impact, a didactic mess of great performances and indulgent reflection that grabs attention, but never maintains focus long enough – and is too content to use David as a simplistic surrogate for his abundantly recognizable thematic modus operandi. That being said, Highest 2 Lowest certainly isn’t Lee’s worst film – at the very least, it is certainly worth experiencing for Washington’s elevating performance, and the curiously reflective qualities of its first and third acts, though anyone hoping for a great crime thriller or character study will ultimately walk away disappointed.

Grade: C+