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Spike Lee and Denzel Washington Fall Back in Love with New York in Highest 2 Lowest

By Jesse Hassenger  |  August 13, 2025 | 9:15am
Movies Reviews Spike Lee
Spike Lee and Denzel Washington Fall Back in Love with New York in Highest 2 Lowest
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Spike Lee is not one of his movie characters, and his characters are not him, probably especially Monty Brogan (Edward Norton), the (white, culturally Irish) drug dealer facing down his final day of freedom before a prison sentence in 25th Hour. When, in the middle of a now-famous rant cursing out just about every major ethnic group, professional class, and social enclave in New York City, Monty runs down Puerto Ricans and concludes his quick condemnation with “worst fuckin’ parade in the city,” that clearly wasn’t Spike Lee talking. But there’s still an element of exuberant apology when, halfway through Highest 2 Lowest, David King (Denzel Washington) rides the 4 train up through Manhattan into the Bronx to deliver a multimillion-dollar ransom, and the movie luxuriates in both the Yankees game and the Puerto Rican Day Parade, flooding the subway cars with fans and merrymakers. Technically, the people chanting LET’S GO YANKEES! and the blasting music courtesy of the late Eddie Palmieri should be a nuisance to David, who is putting himself and his livelihood on the line in this sequence, mixing back in with the city’s rabble after looming high above them in his swanky skyscraping digs. But again: Lee is not his character, at least not in that particular moment, and it’s hard to fully commit to King’s state of mind. For the subway scenes, Lee switches from digital cinematography to 16mm celluloid, embracing the warmth and grain. He has a Yankees fan turn to the camera and scream that Boston sucks. Earlier, the movie begins with “Oh What a Beautiful Mornin’,” from Oklahoma!, playing over shots of the city skyline. Has ever a filmmaker loved New York City this much?

He loves it so much, in fact, that he can even venture into one of the city’s high rises and locate some sympathy for David King, a music mogul and a millionaire seemingly many times over. Being a man of some years, David and, perhaps more importantly, his label Stackin’ Hits are past their commercial peak. But he has a plan to scrape together enough cash to scotch a pending sale of the label, and instead buy out his partner, taking back control of the business and hoping to revitalize it in the process. Is this a matter of artistic principle or power-tripping ego? Washington makes a convincing case for both. He plays King warmly, charmingly, stubborn but not uncaring. He’s firm but playful with his teenage son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) – and when the boy seems to be kidnapped, he will do anything for his return.

Ah, but what if Trey wasn’t actually the one kidnapped? What if criminals accidentally took Kyle (Elijah Wright), Trey’s best friend and the son of King’s driver and assistant/friend Paul Christopher (Jeffrey Wright, Elijah’s real-life dad), and decided to roll with that mistake, demanding a massive ransom anyway? Suddenly a family tragedy becomes a moral dilemma. Or a soap opera. Lee’s film riffs on the 1963 film High and Low, directed by no less than Akira Kurosawa, and itself adapted from an English-language Ed McBain crime novel, but its policework happens off to the side, with 30 Rock’s Dean Winters taking over the mouthy-white-cop role that might have once been earmarked for Michael Rapaport. Winters’ second-most-famous gig as the Allstate “Mayhem” personified also gets a shout-out, in an unexpected mini-runner about insurance.

That’s but one small example of an ongoing and unconventional pleasure of Lee’s work, especially his later films: How the smoothness of a master filmmaker of four decades can be interrupted with something jagged or strange. It’s like he’s continually mixing poetry and prose, and then throws in a dash of PowerPoint. So there are early-to-middle stretches where Highest 2 Lowest sets up its central crime and David King then ruminates over how to handle this twist of fate where the movie clanks and clunks, its digressive but not quite free-associative style resulting in a few false starts and odd feints. It’s a movie that sometimes feels obsessed with music, and sometimes feels like an old man flipping back to his preferred, familiar playlist. Real-life musicians like ASAP Rocky and Ice Spice dot the cast; Rocky shares a downright electric scene opposite Washington late in the game, while Ice Spice, ah, definitely appears. Ilfenesh Hadera’s performance as David’s wife Pam feels particularly off, despite her decade-long working relationship with Lee. (This is their third movie together; then again, by the terms of Lee’s swelling rep company, she might still count as a neophyte.) Lee’s decades-long fondness for overbearing scores remains, and his frequent collaborator Howard Drossin doesn’t get quite the same pass in that regard as Terence Blanchard.

Washington, though, stays locked in even as he loosens up; even when he gets, yeah, a little weird. And by the time he boards that subway, the movie around him locks right in, too. Urban kidnapping stories tend toward the labyrinthine, but beyond an excitingly overelaborate ransom drop, this one is mostly believable, at least in its broad mechanics. More importantly, it gets David King out of his castle, and Highest 2 Lowest becomes a movie about a powerful man struggling against gravitational pull, and maybe rediscovering his scrappiness in the process. It may not be the anticapitalist critique some viewers might hope for in 2025; Lee and Washington are both rich elders at this point, and it’s possible they’re just a little too sympathetic to their multimillionaire lead character to make a movie that truly advocates the dismantling of traditional power structures. The movie can’t quite differentiate King’s artistic contributions from his ability to keep stackin’ those hits.

Then again, Highest 2 Lowest seems intended more as an urban fable about perseverance and a few accompanying moral choices, rather than an outright morality treatise. One of the film’s most crucial, entertaining, and unpredictable scenes unfolds in a dingy recording booth, again bringing David away from his lofty vantage point and closer, it’s implied, to where he started. You can practically hear Lee clapping in delight from just off-camera, just as you can feel his gleeful warmth when his camera focuses in on Washington standing on the Brooklyn Bridge, music blaring from his golden Beats headphones. He can’t kill that vibe to condemn the selfishness and ego lurking within David King, or other New York movers and shakers. He loves his city too much.

Director: Spike Lee
Writer: Alan Fox
Starring: Denzel Washington, Jeffrey Wright, Ilfenesh Hadera, Aubrey Joseph, ASAP Rocky
Release Date: August 15, 2025 (theaters); September 5, 2025 (Apple TV+)

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.

 
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