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Denzel Washington - Highest 2 Lowest
Denzel Washington in Spike Lee's Highest 2 Lowest (2025)
Spike Lee might resist calling his latest film a remake. Working like a jazz musician reinterpreting an old melody, Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest reimagines Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 film High and Low. He transposes it from there and then to here and now, casting Denzel Washington in the lead role as David King, a music mogul drawn into a kidnapping conspiracy. In the original film, the protagonist gained his wealth from the far less glamorous business of manufacturing shoes.
As Highest 2 Lowest begins, the sun rises over Manhattan to the tune of “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.” The Rodgers and Hammerstein number turns ironic—King wakes up ready to reconquer the world until the morning takes an unexpected turn. His era-defining label had produced multiple Grammies and gold records a quarter century ago, but as the millennium zips forward, he’s a bit out of sync and yet is poised to buy back controlling interest in the company he founded. It was going to be a beautiful morning until he gets a phone call from a kidnapper who says they have his son Trey (Aubrey Joseph). For $17.5 million in Swiss francs, he’ll be returned alive.
King’s status is such the NYPD responds with five squad cars and a team of high-profile detectives. He can raise the money, but the twist comes early. The kidnappers accidently nabbed Kyle (Elijah White), the son of King’s trusted factotum, Paul (Jeffrey Wright). King’s first response: “You expect me to pay for some kidnapper’s mistake?” And yet, Paul—“Uncle Paul” to Trey—is more like family than servant. Kyle is Trey’s best friend. But paying the $17.5 million might mean trading his bid to buy back his record label for the life of another man’s son. Will King do the right thing?
Highest 2 Lowest has two dominant factors. The first is Washington’s always-on-point performance, shifting with natural ease from frustrated to funny, business to funk, caring to forbidding. He can cut million dollar deals by cell phone on the way to the elevator. He can also descend into despairing turmoil, beseeching the Black musicians whose photos adorn his office—James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix: “What would you do?”
New York Setting
The second factor is New York itself, starting with King’s elegantly furnished aeries, the terraced high-rise duplex condo and the record label offices that command spectacular views of the Brooklyn Bridge and the skyscrapers crowding the shoreline. Yankee stadium is a setting for the loud rivalry between Yankees and Celtics. The crowded streets become a racecourse for an expertly choreographed chase between cops and kidnappers on mopeds. The subway train rattles and clanks as King rides along the city’s elaborate network of subterranean passageways with the ransom money. One of Highest 2 Lowest’s most brilliantly conceived scenes unfolds during a Puerto Rico Day celebration featuring salsa master Eddie Palmieri (who died before the film premiered) entertaining a dancing, flag-waving crowds whose festivities impede cops and kidnappers alike.
Kurosawa based his film on a novel by New York crime writer Ed McBain. Lee brought the story home to his hometown.
Lee’s choice to reinterpret Kurosawa speaks to his grounding in art house cinema, delivered with entertaining flair as seen through his own cultural lens. Highest 2 Lowest is suffused with distinctive references—the Harlem Renaissance art on King’s walls, his wife Pam’s (Ilfenesh Hadera) philanthropy for young Black artists, a detective who proudly graduated from Spelman College, Paul’s devotion to the Islamic Five Percenters and King’s concern with keeping his R&B label from falling into the clutches of soulless transnationals.
King is on top of the world as Highest 2 Lowest begins, and the kidnappers down below are straining to steal a glimpse from his elevated perch.
