Highest 2 Lowest is a defense of family legacy, masculine authority, and cultural inheritance.
Note: This review contains spoilers.
“All money ain’t good money.” That’s the heartbeat of Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, a Brooklyn riff on Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low. Lee isn’t trying to one-up Kurosawa (no one can). He uses the classic as scaffolding to build his own New York remix, and what comes out may be his most — dare I say — conservative joint yet: a defense of family legacy, masculine authority, and cultural inheritance.
Denzel Washington plays David King, once the wunderkind with “the best ears in the business,” now a music mogul under siege. We first see him in his DUMBO penthouse, balcony opening onto the Financial District, as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” drifts over the credits, a cheeky hymn to his kingdom in the clouds. Investors are circling the label he built, Stackin’ Hits. He’s leveraged everything — the apartment, the summer home, the art, his own name — to claw it back. “They’ll squeeze every drop of black culture I’ve spent 25 years building,” he warns a board member. “Do they care about the music? Our music?”
His home tells you a lot about King and his family: a traditional father rooted in heritage, proud of his reign, and uneasy about where things are headed. Outside his office hang portraits of Frederick Douglass and jazz titans. Time and Rolling Stone covers mark his accomplishments. Photos of James Brown, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix keep watch.
The apartment is modern but softened by kente touches. His wife, Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera), a full-time mom and philanthropist, tilts toward Wiley and Basquiat. Their son Trey, pure Gen Z, tacks Kamala Harris alongside Michael Jordan. And Paul Christopher (Jeffrey Wright), King’s chauffeur and oldest friend, reveals his own worldview through a photo of Malcolm X on the wall and a pistol in the glove compartment for “insurance.” Four different visions of black America under one roof.
King drops Trey off at basketball practice, then slides into a blue-and-white Rolls-Royce that matches his tailored suit. Paul’s at the wheel as they head to Lower Manhattan. They may have come from the same neighborhood, but now one rides in the back while the other drives. McFadden & Whitehead’s “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now,” an old-school anthem of black upward mobility, blasts on the speaker. The needle drop lands like commentary: Differences aside, this crew’s still climbing.
Later that day the phone rings. A voice tells King they’ve kidnapped his son. Lee frames the moment with family photographs in the foreground — a lineage suddenly under siege. Seventeen and a half million or his kid dies. But then comes the twist: They mistook Paul’s son, Kyle, for Trey. Kurosawa gave Toshiro Mifune the same bind in High and Low, forcing him to weigh his personal fortune against another man’s child. Lee updates it for 2025: King may sneer at social media, but he doesn’t want to be remembered as “David King, the man with the best ears — and the coldest heart.”
The setup strains somewhat, but not on account of Denzel. His charisma holds the first act together, even when the script pushes credibility. We never truly believe he won’t pay — Paul is more kin than help, no matter who’s in the back seat. Plus, King himself has already said there’s more to life than bling. Still, Lee holds the tension with overlapping edits, surprise cameos, and stylistic flourishes.
The film hits its stride when the lead detective, framed in one of Lee’s signature double-dolly shots on the penthouse balcony, spells out the ransom drop. From there, King boards the 4 train with a backpack full of Swiss francs, the subway thick with claustrophobia, and Yankee fans roaring. Cut to the Bronx’s Puerto Rican Day Parade: The late Eddie Palmieri hammering the piano, bomba dancers pounding like breakers, Boricua flags whipping the neighborhood into carnival. It nods to The French Connection, Daybreak Express, and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. This is Spike at his best — jazz, funk, NYC, and cinema colliding. The whole sequence will make you feel like you just landed in the city, minus the crawl from LaGuardia.
I don’t want to spoil the rest for you, but beneath the spectacle, Lee’s playing in a different register from the original. Kurosawa staged High and Low as a police procedural, shifting the story to the machinery of justice. Lee sticks with Washington, making the drama less about institutions and more about rootedness. Even the name carries weight: David King is King David reversed — not a shepherd rising to rule, but a ruler pressed back into family sovereignty. Authority here lasts only when it’s tethered to higher goods.
The dialogue brims with meta-commentary, channeling Lee’s frustrations with where the film industry, and a culture he helped build, have drifted. In one heated exchange, Trey mouths off. King stares him down, that Harris poster visible in the background, as he reminds him there’s still only one man in their house. The staging makes the subtext unavoidable: a patriarch pushing back at a generation he sees as too online, too hungry for clout, too quick to confuse attention with achievement.
The movie crackles when it should, even if its seams show. Some supporting roles never land; violins crowd moments that would work better in silence; and there’s a clunky plug for the “Ebony Alert.” But Lee’s stitching is still preferable to “content” lacquered to death with lifeless gloss. Even if you don’t share his politics, you can’t help but respect when an artist tells us, through his work, to just let him cook.
We should, because when Highest 2 Lowest sizzles, it really sings — sometimes literally. For instance, when Washington squares off with A$AP Rocky’s Yung Felon in a recording booth, their dialogue slides into freestyle. Two black men divided by fortune, joined by rhythm. Denzel’s intensity against Rocky’s rawness, less a conversation than dueling instruments locked in battle.
The film’s sweetest notes are reserved for someone new. Aiyana-Lee, a 24-year-old British singer Lee discovered on Instagram, debuts as Sula, Trey’s crush, auditioning in King’s apartment. She performs “Highest 2 Lowest,” the song she wrote for the film, live and unfiltered. Everything stops. King listens and, in that moment, the shot pulls back and we see a glimpse of continuity: David and Pam, charting the arc of their shared life, while Trey and Sula begin sketching the outlines of theirs. Her voice then returns in the credits in a reworking of Adriano Celentano’s cult banger (title unpronounceable, by design). Celentano mocked American pop with gibberish that only sounded like English, parodying music stripped of substance. Lee flips it. He keeps the rhythm but trades the babble for soul and, maybe, a message: Critique has its place (Spike built much of his career on it), but what endures are roots, craft, inheritance.
That’s why the moral of Highest 2 Lowest feels conservative in the deepest sense — not in the Hunter’s Laptop Part IV: The Crack Chronicles caricature of a “conservative movie,” but in the kind rooted in preserving culture, family, and order.
Denzel’s own posture echoes that vision. As he put it in a recent interview: “I fear God, not men. Not the industry. Not Apple. Not Spike Lee. Not this world.” His voice cracked as he added that his life’s mission now is “to lead more souls to our Heavenly Father.” The film breathes that conviction. King begins as ruler and ends as servant — of legacy and something, or Someone, higher.
Not all money is good money. Some of it corrodes. The task of a king is to know the difference.