Spike and Denzel Get Together Again in a New York Crime Drama
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- Sep 4
- 4 min read
By Laurence Lerman / New York City
There’s a moment early in Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest when the camera cranes over Manhattan at dawn, sunlight glinting off the skyscrapers as the city awakes. It’s more than an establishing shot; it reminds us that Lee and his leading man, Denzel Washington, are products of this place. New York has long been the ground where Lee has staged his most vivid storytelling (not to mention his fiercest arguments) and where Washington, under Lee’s direction, delivered one of his defining screen performances in 1992’s Malcolm X. Their latest reunion for a modern reimagining of Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 High and Low feels energized by that shared history, as if the two artists were circling back to the land that created and nurtured them.
In adapting Kurosawa’s procedural drama (taken from Ed McBain’s 1959 novel King’s Ransom), Lee steers the story into the storied contradictions of 21st century New York. Kurosawa’s original was a moral fable about wealth colliding with the kidnapping of a child. Lee keeps the framework but threads it through the subjects he has long examined: race, class, family, and the thin membrane separating privilege from despair.
Washington plays Brooklyn-based music mogul David King, whose empire wobbles when a child is abducted—not he and his wife’s teenaged son, but rather that of his longtime friend and driver Paul (the always-fine Jeffrey Wright). So, what to do…?
Everyone seems to have a different opinion on the options with the ensuing moral dilemma, including Ilfenesh Hadera as David’s magnetic wife, who supplies the story’s conscience; and Dean Winters, John Douglas Thompson and LaChanze as the case’s three investigative detectives. In supporting turns, A$AP Rocky and Ice Spice add support as they embody a younger, more incendiary New York, which Lee uses as an additional spark in the combustibility of the situation.
Sixty years ago, the masterful Kurosawa split High and Low cleanly in two: it began as a tense chamber drama followed by a procedural descent into the city’s seamy underworld. Lee honors that architecture but reconfigures it. In the early goings on, boardroom debates grow into arguments about legacy and gentrification within the Black community. The inevitable descent into ugliness and danger physicalizes into a traverse across today’s economic chasm—from penthouses hung with art (much of it reproductions of Lee’s own collection) to subway tunnels that reek of neglect.
What elevates Lee’s film beyond an homage is its immediacy. Kurosawa captured postwar Japan’s economic tensions; Lee confronts America in the age of widening inequality. In a strong sequence, Washington surveys Manhattan from his glass-walled office while, intercut, we see the kidnapper’s cramped tenement. The juxtaposition is blunt, but Lee has always wielded bluntness like a weapon.
Lee also layers in signature flourishes: kinetic dolly shots, needle drops that range from anachronistic to inspired, flashes of surrealism. Kurosawa’s world was austere; Lee’s is exuberant, even unruly. Yet the central question endures: how much is a human life worth, and what will you sacrifice to save it?
At 70, Washington has eased up on the intensity that defined his younger years, but his gravitas is unmatched. As a man torn between self-preservation and moral obligation, he gives a performance that almost feels like a career summation. The 68-year-old Lee knows it, too, framing Washington with reverence—often from low angles, his face etched in light and shadow—as if these images are meant to endure.
What resonates most is the reunion of Washington and Lee, who have collaborated five times previously with the New York-based films Mo’ Better Blues (1990), Malcolm X (1992), He Got Game (1998), Bamboozled (2000), and Inside Man (2006). That quarter of a century of work found Lee expanding on his careerlong exploration of race relations and issues within the Black community, while each film revealed a different aspect of Washington’s talent—from romantic lead to historic titan to conflicted father and satirical foil. Together, the two New York-born artists have built one of modern cinema’s richest actor-director associations.
Ultimately, what Lee and Washington have crafted is more than a remake (and at 140 minutes, a lengthy one). It’s a meditation on art, legacy, and time—not only for the characters but for two artists whose careers are inseparable from New York’s movie history. Their collaborations have always carried the rhythm and ambition of the city that shaped them. Highest 2 Lowest distills that bond, and if it proves to be their final project together, it stands as a farewell worthy of their partnership—and of the place where they’ve done their most memorable work.
Highest 2 Lowest premiered in theaters on August 15 and will make its streaming debut on Apple TV+ on September 5.
Laurence Lerman is a film journalist, a former editor of Video Business--Variety's digital media trade publication—and husband to The Insider's own Gwen Cooper. Over the course of his four-decade career, he has conducted one-on-one interviews with just about every major filmmaker working today, from Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Clint Eastwood to Kathryn Bigelow, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Werner Herzog. Most recently, he is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online review site DiscDish.com, the founder and curator of FilmShul.com, a multi-part presentation on the history of Hollywood and Jewish America, and a commentator on various 4K UHD and Blu-ray home entertainment releases.
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