Toward the beginning of Jay-Z’s “The Story of O.J.,” the rapper-cum-boardroom fixture adlibs a lament about a missed opportunity in real estate. “I coulda bought a place in DUMBO before it was DUMBO / For like two million / That same place today is worth 25 million.” It’s a complicated line within a thorny and somber examination about what it means to be a Black man on either side of the economic divide. “The Story of O.J.” appears on 4:44, Jay-Z’s last album to date, late into a career that saw verses about street hustling ebb toward owning stakes in streaming apps and the Brooklyn Nets. Jay-Z had rapped about that ascent with bravado on past albums; in “The Story of O.J.,” the stretch across tax brackets seems to be weighing on him for the first time.
Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest opens on David King (Denzel Washington), a seasoned record label exec with “the best ears in the business,” as he works to close a deal over the phone. He’s standing on a penthouse roof of the Olympia DUMBO, a monolithic apartment complex that towers over the East River and caught scores of real-life protests from neighbors over its construction in 2022. In his salad days, King founded Stackin’ Hits Records, one of the major labels of NYC hip-hop — think L.A. Reid’s Arista Records or Russell Simmons’ Def Jam. Now, gilded twice over and looking toward the end of his career, King is angling to buy back a majority share in Stackin’ Hits and save his legacy from a holding company threatening to dilute the music for capital gains. The deal seems to be going King’s way — until he fields a call from the police. His son has been kidnapped, and the culprits demand a $17 million ransom.
Highest 2 Lowest is a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (itself an adaptation of Ed McBain’s King’s Ransom) and marks the fifth entry over four decades of collaboration between Spike Lee and Denzel Washington. Late into their respective careers, the director and actor work together as a well-oiled machine. Though few would accuse Highest 2 Lowest of perfection, it’s as sleek and assured as any Spike joint this side of 9/11; with Washington, Lee maintains both muse and mouthpiece. As David King rallies support among sympathetic Stackin’ Hits board members, he waxes poetic about the importance of Black music’s legacy, the value of integrity against attention, the quagmire of AI in the space of art. The soliloquies are Spike Lee distillate: cumbersome in exposition, occasionally corny, and searingly earnest. They also make a case for the adaptation to sit among Lee’s most personal work.
In its first half, Highest 2 Lowest adheres devoutly to its source material, for better and for worse. Kurosawa’s 1963 crime epic is deceivingly intricate, and Lee’s adaptation can struggle in laying its cards with the finesse of its source. King’s own character risks geriatric motion sickness when Lee grabs the God mic to groan about social media; Highest 2 Lowest’s plot endures similar turbulence as it sets up its stellar final hour. King works with the police, his wife, Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera), and his day-one confidant and driver, Paul (Jeffery Wright), to get his son back to safety. They soon discover there’d been a mistake: as in Kurosawa’s original, King’s son had traded clothes with his buddy (this time, at basketball practice), and the kidnappers grabbed the wrong guy — instead of King’s son (Aubrey Joseph), they’ve taken Paul’s (Elijah Wright).
Kurosawa handed Lee a hefty bit of exposition, and Lee does himself no favors by weaving his own takes on the state of media through his adaptation’s first act. Still, it makes for an engaging proposition, all the more so through Denzel Washington’s categorically muscled performance. The kidnapping mix-up enters King into a high-stakes game of scruples. Paul couldn’t follow King’s journey from the block to the C-suite, instead doing bids in a prison upstate and devoting himself to Islam, and he must rely on his friend and benefactor to get his son back. Rich as he is, King had to pull strings with financiers to leverage enough capital to gain back control of Stackin’ Hits, and paying the kidnappers would tank any hope of retaining control of the label.
There is no winning for King: pay the ransom and lose his legacy, or keep the money and spurn his lifelong friend. For all its tedium, Highest 2 Lowest’s first act survives on the spectacle of a moral giant like Denzel doing everything he can to avoid doing the right thing. Cinematographer Matthew Libatique is reverent to Kurosawa’s meticulous blocking, through which Washington cracks his knuckles, shoots finger guns at his enemies, paces and sweats and strains and sobs. His performance as David King feels like the inevitable conclusion of a cinematic relationship that’s grown from stoop-busting vitality to the bespoke conservativism that molds Lee’s past decade of work; here is a man who shaped New York hip-hop and whose greatest asset today is to keep it siloed within his reach.
King, of course, makes the right choice and agrees to pay the ransom. That money, we eventually learn, is going to a local Brooklyn rapper named Yung Felon (A$AP Rocky). A$AP Rocky is Highest 2 Lowest’s revelation; as Yung Felon, he is charismatic, volatile, and, no small feat, matches Denzel Washington’s bravado beat for beat. His introduction also unfurls the movie as its own entity. Where Kurosawa’s original segments into a police procedural, Lee allows King to pursue the villain himself. It’s a considered choice that both lends Lee’s subject extended agency and allows the director to flex his most seasoned muscle: bestowing life onto the streets of New York. Aided by the police, King elects to deliver the ransom — and eventually pursue Felon — himself. It amounts to some of the most ornate and kinetic scenes of Spike Lee’s career. In the movie’s centerpiece, King throws the money from a moving train during the Puerto Rican Day Parade, where parties on either side of the kidnapping weave through festival goers, commuters, vagabonds, and Yankees fans drunk on Boston hate. In a movie dogged by clunky exposition and uneven execution, it’s a thrilling reminder of Lee’s mastery.
Kurosawa ends High and Low with an exchange between his own protagonist (Toshiro Mifune) and the kidnapper through the glass of a prison cell. The scene is both monologue and missive, a late-hour thesis on the fractured economy of post-WWII Japan and its pursuant divide of its communities. Lee transposes this moment to a recording booth, where, having sleuthed Yung Felon within a poor Brooklyn neighborhood not far from his own Olympia, King confronts the kidnapper in what evolves into a transcendent dialogue that splits its execution somewhere between rap battle and Shakespearean denouement. It’s Spike Lee’s own “The Story of O.J.”: two men who grew up within blocks of each other, bound by traditions of Black art, stand on either side of an economic canyon with little hope of meeting in between.
It may have set up an excellent conclusion, but in a decision congruent to Highest 2 Lowest’s earlier missteps, Lee doubles down with a faithful recreation of Kurosawa’s prison scene… and tacks on a baffling coda of a full-length singing audition for the new label he forms with his family. It amounts to a picture of a powerful director who can’t seem to stay out of his own way. A tighter cut may have posited Highest 2 Lowest as one of the strongest films of the year; as it exists, the movie is a slightly dizzy and occasionally brilliant entry from a New York veteran reckoning with his own ascent from the streets of Bed-Stuy to courtside at the Knicks.
DIRECTOR: Spike Lee; CAST: Denzel Washington, Jeffrey Wright, A$AP Rocky, Ilfenesh Hadera; DISTRIBUTOR: A24/Apple TV+; IN THEATERS: August 15; STREAMING: September 5; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 13 min.
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