Title – Highest 2 Lowest (2025)

Director – Spike Lee (Inside Man)

Cast – Denzel Washington, Jeffrey Wright, Ilfenesh Hadera, A$AP Rocky

Plot – New York based record company kingpin David King (Washington) finds his life thrown in chaos when his son and godson get caught up in an elaborately planned kidnapping scheme.  

“I think you gotta be a little crazy sometimes in this world to get what you want”

Review by Eddie on 16/09/2025

Not many filmgoers would’ve had Spike Lee doing a modern day take on Akira Kurosawa’s famed 1963 crime thriller High and Low on their 2025 film bingo card but unphased by his previous failure in the remake/reimagining game with his misguided Oldboy, here we are with Highest 2 Lowest.

A collaboration between A24 and Apple TV+, Lowest reunites Lee with one of his favourite acting muses in the form of Denzel Washington, working together for the first time since 2006’s breakout crime thriller Inside Man, as the two long-term friends reimagine Kurosawa’s Tokyo set original into a modern day New York City where Washington’s record mogul David King finds himself in a game of cat and mouse with a money hungry kidnapper.

Clocking in over two hours, Lowest is an unsurprisingly dialogue driven affair that asks a lot of Washington and his off-sider Jeffrey Wright as King’s confidant Paul Christopher as Lee takes his time to really get firing as his well-shot yet hard to love thriller gets its teeth into the meaty parts of its narrative that showcase a film that could’ve been something special.

Filmed beautifully by D.O.P Matthew Libatique, once more showcasing that Lee is one of the best directors when it comes to capturing his beloved New York City for the big screen, there’s the sheen and layer of a ripping crime yarn here but there’s a lot of wasted time in Lowest’s 130 or so minutes and with a bunch of cold underdeveloped characters at the core of this kidnapping/random tale, it’s hard to get overly invested in anything happening on screen.

Another major flaw to the film outside of trying to figure out what it’s trying to say if it even wants to say anything at all is the insanely out of place and game-ruining score from composer Howard Drossin.

With tinkling ivories blasting into our eardrums at every given moment, it’s hard to conjure up another more glaring example of a mood ruining and grating cinematic score in my memory.

Squashing any chance the film had of creating a decent mood and atmosphere in its more tense and taut moments or wannabe be thrilling set pieces, Drossin’s score is highly inappropriate and unnecessary, even at times drowning out important on screen conversations and dialogue heavy segments.

Some of the films later moments, including some solid interplay between Washington and rap superstar A$AP Rocky as wannabe music dynamo Yung Felon and some neat visual tricks that are part of the parcel of a Lee joint ensure Lowest isn’t a complete failure but it’s a highly forgettable outing overall and a rather poorly designed redoing of a classic genre piece.

Final Say –

Irritating rather than gripping, thanks mostly to one of the most incessantly overbearing and misguided scores you couldn’t even conjure up in your darkest of imaginations, Highest 2 Lowest has its moments but is far from the great heights of Lee’s best works.

2 Puerto Rican street parties out of 5