Highest 2 Lowest (2025)
The newest Spike Lee Joint lifts off with an uncharacteristic song, an anthem of old Hollywood and Broadway, “Oh, What and Beautiful Mornin’ ” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s famous 1943 musical and 1955 film Oklahoma. Paired with dazzling vistas of a glistening Manhattan, the tone seems out of sorts with what we expected from Lee, until we realize that lyrics like “I’ve got a beautiful feeling, everything’s going my way,” speak perfectly to the present wealth and lifestyle of a certain King family, while also foreboding a coming storm. How long will everything go their way? Written by Evan Hunter, Akira Kurosawa, and Hideo Oguni, and based upon Kurosawa’s 1963 film High and Low, the movie reunites Lee with Denzel Washington who, as celebrated music mogul, David King, is out to buy back his company from his partner Patrick Bethea (Michael Potts) who would rather sell to a corporation and move on.
It is the Oklahoma anthem that is playing as an epic drone shot swoops in on King on his penthouse patio while on a business call to seal the deal for the loan he’ll need to take back his company, and he believes, his legacy. The movie unfolds in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, between King’s glorious penthouse which he shares with his beautiful and poised wife Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera) and his seventeen-year-old son Trey (Aubrey Joseph), his music company offices in Brooklyn, and the scenes of the crime in the Bronx.
But before Lee introduces the central drama, through the cultured luxury of the opulent King penthouse we are informed that the Kings are a family of wealth and prestige. The house is filled with fine art including portraits of African American sports icons like Muhammad Ali and music legends like Aretha Franklin. It is also bursting with paintings by famous black artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and William H. Johnson. David’s face graces framed copies of magazine covers like Rolling Stone and Time. It is in this context that Pam casually tells David that she is heading to a board meeting at the celebrated Studio Museum in Harlem where she will inform Thelma (that’s director and chief curator Thelma Golden for those in the know) that they intend to donate their usual $500,000.00 USD to the museum. Soon after David has a driver take him and Trey to his son’s basketball camp which happens to be run by Rick Fox (yes, that Rick Fox), playing himself! David has yet another driver and live-in employee Paul Christopher (Jeffrey Wright), a devoted Muslim who has spent time inside.
At the heart of the film is a crisis of morality which David and his family must confront when the unspeakable happens. David gets a call from an unknown man informing him that he has kidnapped his son. In the panic that ensues, David contacts the police who send detectives from the Major Crime Unit to set up a base in their home. In a moment that reveals Pam’s vacuousness, when she tells the police to set their tech up on the dining room table, she instructs them to move the flowers to the left side of the fireplace. It is hard to decipher if she is so overwhelmed that she is fussing over insignificant details or if she is truly that thoughtless and vapid. Sadly, it may be the latter.
When the kidnapper, a faceless man who sounds young and African American – eventually identified as a rapper named Yung Felon (A$AP Rocky) – gets in touch again, it is to demand 17,500,000.00 in Swiss 1,000.00 bank notes. Why? Because, as one black female detective determines, it will be a much lighter bag to carry than one filled with many more $100.00 USD bank notes. But while David scrambles to assemble loans that were slated to buy back his business to instead barter for his son’s life, relief comes (at least for him and Pam) when Trey is found safe and sound. But the King family’s relief soon becomes Paul’s worst nightmare as the police determine that it was actually his son Kyle (Elijah Wright) who was kidnapped when he was mistaken for Trey. The morality tale that unfolds hinges upon the differences in the King family response and the police response when they find out that it is Kyle, son of a former felon Paul, as opposed to Trey, son of the wealthy and famous music legend David King, that has been taken.
While the banter and camaraderie of David and Paul earlier in the car demonstrates a bond that transcended employer and employee, the cracks start to show when Trey is brought home, and David insists that he be allowed to rest instead of exhaustively presenting every possible detail to the police about what happened to Kyle. When the police concur, we of course understand that this would never have happened if Kyle was the one with the information about Trey’s disappearance.
So, begins the downward slide of David and Pam who are clearly unwilling to commit to offering the same ransom for Kyle’s safe return although everyone understands that he was taken accidently by a kidnapper who thought he was Trey! Making matters worse, we are privy to David and Pam’s private conversation in which they discuss the public optics of refusing to pay the ransom. What becomes clear is that the people who care the most about Kyle’s safe return are Paul and Trey, the former who pleads with David and promises to pay back every cent of any ransom and the latter who curses at his father, imploring him to pay it. It is in this moment that we see that Trey is David’s conscience.
It is only after these confrontations that David decides to use the money (intended to save his business) to try to retrieve Kyle who we see is alone, bound, and gagged in a filthy looking bathtub in a filthier looking room, with hip hop music pounding through the wall. But David and Pam believe they will get the money back because the police have placed a tracker in the backpack with the ransom money.
The movie follows David and the police as they make the ransom drop and are thwarted by enthusiastic Yankee fans, Puerto Rican Day parade revellers, and a synchronized team of moped riders who pass off the ransom bag in an effort to escape the teams of plain clothes detectives they know are watching. In the end we must wait to discover if Kyle can be saved from the disgruntled kidnapper and if David can get back the ransom and save his flailing company.
Highest 2 Lowest speaks to the value of life and the political and social power of money by critiquing a world in which all human life is not equally valued, and people make life changing and life ending decisions based on their desires for self-preservation and their inability to see the humanity in others. As for the police, it is clear that they too prize Trey’s life more than Kyle’s in the way that they interrogate Paul and refuse to insist upon Trey’s immediate help in sharing potentially life-saving details about Kyle’s kidnapping. Indeed, it seems certain that the NYPD Major Crime Unit would never have been dispatched if the police had known from the start that it was Kyle and not Trey who had been kidnapped. After Paul learns that David and Pam are willing to pay the ransom to free his son, a devote Muslim, he falls to his knees in prayer in the King’s kitchen. His son has been taken because of Yung Felon’s hatred for David, but he is helpless to aid his son without David’s wealth.
Highest 2 Lowest is a morality play that asks us to consider the life-altering decisions and repercussions of David, Pam, the police, and Yung Felon. While Yung Felon is clearly the criminal, the other characters exhibit a spectrum of behaviors from the questionable to the outright immoral. Washington, Wright, and Rocky turn in noteworthy performances, but the film would have evoked greater emotion if the Kings were either more sinister or more delusional in their detachment from the everyday realities of normal people. As it stands, they are neither, not sinister enough for us to root against them nor endearing enough for us to root for them.
Highest 2 Lowest is worth seeing for its loving cinematic reverence for NYC (it is Lee’s love letter to his beloved city), the luxurious vision of a loving black family, and the quintessential Lee style, but we can’t help thinking that there was a missed opportunity for a heightened sense of urgency in the nature and characters of the King family.