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PORTSIDE CULTURE

HIGHEST 2 LOWEST IS A CRINGEWORTHY REMAKE OF A CLASSIC  
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Eileen Jones
August 29, 2025
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest attempts to remake a beloved Akira
Kurosawa film about the injustices of a class-stratified society all
while sidestepping class. Even Denzel Washington can’t save this
misfire. _

Denzel Washington in Highest 2 Lowest. , (A24)

 

I tried to give Spike Lee’s new movie _Highest 2 Lowest_ every
possible chance to have a powerful impact — so much so that I
deliberately avoided rewatching the source material, Akira
Kurosawa’s landmark 1963 film, _High and Low, _itself based on an
Ed McBain novel_._ I haven’t seen it in decades, though I still
vividly remember Toshirō Mifune’s powerhouse performance as well as
just how seriously the film took the class stratification at the heart
of its story.

But I needn’t have bothered. _Highest 2 Lowest, _which is getting
a lot of critical praise even though it’s tanking at the box office
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is a real mess. It’s full of strange choices that pull the
audience’s attention all over the place, along with an overarching
sensibility of Boomer nostalgia for supposedly better times that’s
pretty shocking.

When it comes to the strange choices, look no further than the opening
scene featuring a classic showtune from _Oklahoma!_ (“Oh What a
Beautiful Morning”) sung with manly brio over impossibly glossy
shots of New York City. All that rural imagery called up by the cowboy
singer is matched to oddly empty but soaring shots of cement-and-steel
canyons and skyscrapers and lofty penthouses. At the song’s
crescendo, we meet music mogul David King (Denzel Washington), who is
on the phone trying to make a deal while gazing out from the loftiest
penthouse of them all.

You’re left thinking, well, that peculiar song choice has gotta be
satirizing _something_? Maybe Lee’s mocking the corny camp
qualities its accumulated over almost eighty years as a contrapuntal
force against clashing urban imagery and a depiction of contemporary
creative life in black America? But apparently not. Nothing else ever
happens in the film to develop anything significant about that
peculiar choice. It just happens to be a nice morning in New York
City, and David King is a powerful figure in this world. That’s it.

King, on this particular morning, isn’t even notably happy in his
world. He’s facing many obstacles in his high-risk endeavor to use
all this personal wealth to buy back control of his company,
Stackin’ Hits Records. Concerned at the soulless, all-business,
AI-friendly direction the music industry has taken, he wants to return
to the emphasis on discovering bold, young musical talent that made
him successful in the first place.

With King’s fortune on the line, this precarious deal goes scarily
awry when it seems his teenage son, Trey (Aubrey Joseph), has been
kidnapped. And paying the ransom will break him — or at least,
prevent him from taking back control of Stackin’ Hits Records. It
seems he could still take the fallback deal he’d been trying to
avoid, a very lucrative buyout that would make him even richer but
would mean the loss of the company he built.

Then it turns out that the kidnapper made a mistake and snatched the
son of King’s driver, Paul Christopher (Jeffrey Wright), instead.
Nevertheless, the ransom demand remains the same. The great moral
dilemma of the film is: Will King give up his ownership in the company
he created, denting his grand status in the world, for the sake of his
employee’s son? Lee has weighted the choice heavily on the side of
paying, because Paul Christopher is King’s close friend whom he
rescued from a far rougher life as a struggling ex-con.

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Jeffrey Wright as Paul Christopher in Highest 2 Lowest. (A24)

This central friendship is something screenwriter Alan Fox added while
updating the cool, complex, black-and-white world of the original
Kurosawa film, and it’s perhaps an example of what Spike Lee called
their adaptation process: “We had to put some hot sauce on it.”

In 1963’s _High and Low_, the mogul and the chauffeur are certainly
not friends, though their sons — much younger boys than the
teenagers who’ve been raised together in Lee’s version — are
playmates. The strict, and very Japanese, hierarchical division
between employer and employee in the original film makes the situation
much starker and more agonizing in class terms, with every deferential
bow from the grief-stricken chauffeur reinforcing the great
socioeconomic distance between him and his boss. The whole film
emphasizes the way society has created and constantly reinforces a
virtually impassable abyss between worker and boss.

And it’s made clear in the original that if Kingo Gondo (Toshiro
Mifune) pays the ransom, he really will lose _everything_ — all
his wealth and social status, his hilltop mansion and expensive
possessions, because he’s had to put everything on the line — as
well as borrow immense amounts of money — in order to make the
attempt at a company takeover.

So the viewer feels the whole lead-weight rationale of his (likely)
refusal to sacrifice himself and his family for an employee’s son.
It’s a terrible thing to understand this position, to realize the
extent to which we’re all made to see the world in terms of
upper-class values and concerns. It seems like practically a miracle
to everyone else in the film when pleas and persuasion from the
chauffeur and Gondo’s wife, as well as a betrayal by his closest
associate at work, actually convince him to pay the ransom, with his
financial ruin as the inevitable consequence.

But in _Highest 2 Lowest_, Lee’s “hot sauce” strategy backfires
because it’s clear from the beginning that King _must_ pay the
ransom. It’s not just his _chauffeur_’s son, it’s his _old
friend_’s son. In Lee’s film, it makes King seem like a monster
that he even hesitates, for quite a long while, especially because we
learn he can still opt for the lucrative buyout. The stark moral
choice of _High and Low_ gets so muddled in _Highest 2 Lowest_ it
becomes merely confusing.

David and Pam King (Ilfenesh Hadera) huddle in their garishly opulent
pad to discuss whether they should actually put their wealth on the
line for the son of their old friend, instead of quite possibly
letting the kid be murdered by his abductor. They even consider
solemnly what social media has to say about it. Will everyone vilify
them if they endanger the life of their friend’s son, or even let
him die? But on the other hand, what if the story only goes viral for
a few days, and then some other news takes over, in which case it’d
all blow over?

Presumably we’re supposed to hate these people even if the
ransom _does_ get paid. But no — that’s not how it goes. The
film wants us to come around when King finally agrees to pay, after
many assurances from the cops that they’ll retrieve the money.
We’re apparently supposed to cheer and regard King as a hero by the
end. It’s weird.

The strangest change made by screenwriter Alan Fox to the Kurosawa
film is removing perhaps the most unforgettable aspect of the source
material — the mid-narrative shifts of the film’s point of view,
from the “high” of the rich mogul’s story, to the “low” of
the poor young kidnapper. In the Kurosawa film, there are
disconcertingly smooth camera moves that simply switch from following
the cops hunting in overcrowded slums for the kidnapper, to following
the kidnapper.

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Still from Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low. (Kurosawa Films)

The impoverished young man has lived his entire life in the sweltering
flatlands under the literal shadow of the mogul’s cool, spacious
hilltop home. And he wants someone to pay for the life of systemic
suffering that’s been imposed on himself and his family and
community. The mogul living in luxury directly above him becomes the
natural target.

The daring and the dignity of that structure! Giving the young man
living in poverty several quietly appalling scenes of his own that
constitute his alternate, agonized account and recontextualizes the
mogul’s story constitutes a big part of what makes the original film
so beloved. And, essentially, Fox and Lee just do away with it,
sticking with King’s point of view when encountering the kidnapper.

Without moving into spoiler territory, I’ll simply note that the
devastating ending of Kurosawa’s version is recreated in _Highest 2
Lowest_ as far as the basic setting and situation, but now completely
eviscerated of serious impact. The values of the kidnapper, played by
rapper A$AP Rocky, are repudiated in smug ways that will clearly have
no long-term impact on King, or the audience.

King’s lasting lesson is often repeated in his adage, “All money
ain’t good money.” Make old-school “quality” records in an
old-school way and those profits will be “good” in ways that will
take care of everything. Whereas at the end of _High and Low_, there
is no such neat-and-tidy solution. Gondo is simply back to square one,
having lost his wealth and empire. A clanging iron door that’s
pulled down in his face (and ours) while he sits there immobile and
gutted that is meant to resound despairingly.

What Lee chooses to substitute for Kurosawa’s stark seriousness and
emphasis on the grim consequences of class hierarchy is really
baffling. Ostentatious, with a hot high-contrast color scheme to
counter the earlier film’s sense of cool, _Highest 2
Lowest_ bulges in all directions with Lee’s distracting callouts to
his favorite sports franchises and celebrities. Look, there’s former
NBA star Rick Fox, who was cast in Lee’s _He Got Game_ (1998),
playing a small part as a high school coach, not very convincingly! Oh
hey, there’s actor Rosie Perez, who got vaulted to movie prominence
after she was featured in his film _Do the Right Thing_ (1989)
emceeing a street festival celebrating Puerto Rican culture!

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Ilfenesh Hadera as Pam King in Highest 2 Lowest. (A24)

These weaknesses seem tied into Lee’s heavy-handed nostalgia for
some spurious good ol’ days when he was young and supposedly things
were great in America. Before kids were on cell phones a lot, for
example. Before the intertubes took over. Before capitalists were all
out for profit — even in the music industry, so known for its
integrity and devotion to artistry!

It’s embarrassing.

More distractions involve the performances, some of which are
startlingly bad. Rick Fox isn’t the only one who’s not a slam dunk
at this acting game. Hadera has an important role to play as Pam King,
but nothing in her short list of previous credits
(_Baywatch_,_ Billions_, and _She’s Gotta Have It_) seems to have
prepared her to bring it off. She’s quite stately and beautiful but
acts like a partially animated mannequin, and this doesn’t change
when she’s informed that her son has just been kidnapped. She reacts
with all the distress of a supermodel who’s just heard that the
hairdresser will be ten minutes late.

Dean Winters as Detective Higgins, one of the police officers managing
the kidnapping case, has a role written as a cartoonishly obnoxious
bigot that he plays even more over the top, to the point that he’s
totally unbelievable.

And the brilliant Denzel Washington, who has such range, who’s been
so searingly effective in so many films, has to overcome an age issue
that’s very hard to ignore in order to play King. He’s seventy
now, and though his white hair is dyed black, and he’s apparently
lost about twenty pounds, there’s no making up for the fact that
he’s at least twenty years too old for this part. This becomes
especially painful in the action scenes, when King is supposed to be
chasing down a much, much younger man — and then beating him in a
vicious fistfight. Crude cutaways to a manifestly younger stuntman
playing King running and fighting like a champ are laughably obvious.

And Washington’s been given so many cringe-inducing moments to play
that even he can’t make them work. When King reaches the dreaded
point when he absolutely _must_ decide whether or not to pay the
ransom, he goes into his mammoth rich-guy home-office to ponder it
alone. Then, just when it seems like we’re about to get down to some
real dark-night-of-the-soul drama, he starts reeling around yelling at
the paintings of legendary singers on the walls: “What do I do,
James?! What do I do, Aretha?!”

Once you remove any serious consideration of social class from
material like Kurosawa’s _High and Low_ and give up on that grim
ending of accumulated horrors, you’re not left with not all that
much. I suppose it could be that by now Spike Lee is just too rich and
removed to invest heavily in the inherent injustice of class
stratification that’s central to the source material. Lee lives in a
$32 million townhouse in Manhattan, and for all we know stands out on
his patio every day belting out “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” to
the skyline.

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Contributors

Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of
the Filmsuck podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.

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