Cannes 2025 Review: Spike Lee's 'Highest 2 Lowest' is Gloriously Chaotic
The movie's sincerity can verge on idealistic at times, but it also gives rise to blasts of virtuosic filmmaking and some genuinely affecting moments.
Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low is the kind of film you watch in a state of quasi-paralysis. The 1963 noir is both taut moral thriller and enthralling procedural — a film of relentless jaw-clenching tension and compulsive rhythm that sets the bar for everything it does.
In short, it’s a masterpiece, and so it was always going to be tough for anyone to replicate its magic with a remake, even for a filmmaker of Spike Lee’s stature. So Lee has approached the challenge the only way that gives his Highest 2 Lowest a chance of stepping out from under the shadow of its predecessor: by making it entirely, irrefutably, his own.
That much is apparent from the swoony opening scene, a marked subversion of the bitter cynicism that runs through Kurosawa’s film. In a heads-up that Lee will swap the claustrophobia of High and Low‘s interiors and celebrate the expansiveness of his beloved New York, Highest 2 Lowest begins with a sweeping drone shot of the city at sunrise set to a crooning version of “Oh What a Beautiful Mornin'”, the gleaming neon skyscraper signs all beaming “WELCOME” at us.
That mood virtually never breaks — even when the central drama kicks off. In their (allegedly final) collaboration, Lee has cast Denzel Washington in a spin on Toshiro Mifune’s original role as a corporate executive whose son is the target of a kidnapping plot. Where Mifune’s Gondo was in the shoe business, Washington’s David King is the head of Stackin’ Hits Records, a music label on the verge of a handsome acquisition by an outfit he worries will “squeeze every drop of Black culture” out of it. David isn’t quite ready to retire quietly and see his life’s work go down like this, so we catch him on the eve of an audacious plan to buy out shareholders and reassert the dominance his surname implies. “It’s not a risk, it’s a rebirth,” he tells his sceptical wife Pam (Ilfanesh Hadera), revealing that he’s remortgaged their homes to finance what appears to be a midlife crisis. But hours later, those plans are put on pause by an anonymous phone call he receives revealing that their son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) has been kidnapped for the tidy ransom of 17.5 million Swiss francs (around $21 million).
The moment is oddly anticlimactic, a vacuum of tension that tips us off that Lee’s attentions are elsewhere. Because this isn’t really a movie about a fumbled kidnapping, in which the son (Elijah Wright) of David’s chauffeur Paul (Jeffrey Wright) is mistaken for David’s teenager. Highest 2 Lowest is a film about getting your mojo back when everyone else has written you off, about fatherhood and Black art, about how there’s nowhere else in the world like New York, and about how much Spike Lee loves the Knicks.
It’s the enthusiasm Lee has for those things — and the lightning-fast dynamism with which he toggles between them — that allows the film’s disparate focuses to coalesce. Whenever you start to worry that he’s lost his touch (that non-event of an inciting incident, several bum acting notes, or the often-uninspired cinematography), Lee spins your head with an electric switch-up of tone that reaffirms your belief in him.
Case in point: the handover of the ransom, which takes place on the day of the city’s Puerto Rican parade and coincides with a Yankees game. For a few minutes, we virtually forget about the kidnapping: Lee hurls us headfirst into the buzzy atmospheres of both game day and the parade as Washington’s character travels to the drop-off point via the subway, raucous chants of “Let’s go Yankees! Boston sucks!” and a live performance of Eddie Palmieri’s Salsa Orchestra flushing his plight from our memory through sheer aural power. There are cameos from Anthony Ramos and Do the Right Thing‘s Rosie Perez to further pivot our attention away from the movie’s plot, and Lee even has Nick Turturro appeal directly to us with a passionate Yankees chant delivered straight down Matthew Libatique’s camera.
It’s a radiant, manic scene, one that should almost derail this ostensible thriller — but it works. In fact, the film might not work without it: both audience and movie are fully energised by the time it’s over, and the central drama gets some much-needed invigoration. What follows doesn’t always hit the mark, as Washington’s character over-indulges in fatherly moralising and Lee insists on the upbeat resolution of David’s midlife crisis right till the end. But the film is alive from this point on, especially when David and Paul track down the kidnapper, a (literally) underground rapper played with convincing bitterness by A$AP Rocky. In Rocky’s scenes, the film swerves into new territory again: on first meeting, for example, the duo face off in a rap battle, and a later confrontation is shot like a music video (video vixens included).
It’s in moments like these that Highest 2 Lowest really sings. The movie’s open-hearted sincerity can mean it verges on idealistic at times, but it also gives rise to blasts of virtuosic filmmaking and some genuinely affecting moments. It’s a film steeped in the things the director clearly cares deeply about: basketball, New York City, and Black American art and culture (Basquiat, James Brown, Aretha, Ali, and Stevie Wonder all getting their moments in the spotlight). It does have its tongue-in-cheek moments (smack-talking the Red Sox, a wink at A24), but Highest 2 Lowest is so obviously driven by pure, unbridled love for all the things Lee celebrates that it’s impossible not to be moved by it. Though it’s not his best, it’s perhaps the busiest movie the director has made, and the first in a while to recapture the ecstatic tone of 25th Hour‘s rapturous final moments — meaning it ultimately lands closer to the first word of its title than the last.