Film Review: Highest 2 Lowest
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A new Spike Lee Joint is always a beacon for film fans to seek out. Whether they are good, bad, or somewhere in between, Spike Lee will certainly give you something to ponder and chew on. Unfortunately for us, his new film Highest 2 Lowest does not go down well.
A remake of High Low and a new adaptation of King’s Ransom, Spike has moved the story to modern day New York. Denzel Washington plays David King, a music mogul on the precipice of making a monumental decision about his company, Stacking Hitz Records. Things become more hectic when he gets a call that his son has been kidnapped and the kidnapper is asking for $17.5 million. His wife Pam and right hand man Paul can barely make sense of the situation, but almost as soon as it starts it is defused. Why? Because the kidnappers have actually grabbed Paul’s son instead. What starts as a simple moral quandry expands out as wide and far reaching as the New York City subway.
It’s called Highest 2 Lowest so let’s start with some highs. Denzel Washington is always game for whatever a movie asks of him and he is asked to do a lot in Highest 2 Lowest, most of it incredibly successfully. Even as I felt the movie falling apart around him, his star quality and his ability to make a meal out of every life was most welcome. Jeffrey Wright and A$AP Rocky give this movie energy and performances I’m not sure it deserved, but was grateful to get. Both bring something fascinating to particular archetypes and get to make the movie’s points most eloquently.
Spike Lee has never been a subtle filmmaker, it’s one of his greatest strengths. His ability to grab the audience and force them to wrestle with hard truths and peel back the layers of a story, of a moment, of a topic, is an incredible skill to have and the industry has been all the better for it.
However, Highest 2 Lowest feels like a director, and a crew, indulging in some of their worst instincts in the name of satirizing a subject or making a point. There are stretches of this movie that feel so bizarrely edited, so strangely directed, and perhaps worst of all, terribly scored, that I couldn’t even fully sink in to what it was that Spike really wanted to do. It’s almost amazing that this movie can truly be one of the year’s funniest films and yet feel so flimsily made that you also can’t help but laugh at what you are witnessing. The first half feels like a rough cut of a movie and while the film does lock in at the end, by then the damage has already been done.
The melodrama of the setting never quite gets to the level we need for the satire to feel like it’s taking off and the satire never feels like it’s moving to anything interesting. Most of the female characters suffer because of this unfortunately as their performances neither get played for real laughs or get to sink their teeth into the drama. Plus, for all of the moralizing and introspective thoughts Spike seems to have about the social media age, the movie feels like the equivalent of scanning a TikTok For You Page. Sure they’ll be something you like, but is it worth the constant scrolling through mess.
Well, maybe, because for all the many complaints I have lobbed and will likely continue to lob at this movie, there are sequences that remind you of the brilliance of one of our greatest living filmmakers. Watching Spike conduct a money bag drop sequence that turns to chaos amid the Puerto Rican Day parade is breathtaking to watch and see just how many different elements Spike can harness at once. I will be thinking about that sequence for a while, and probably the whole movie because while this film is decidedly not good, Spike has done his big one to at least make sure it was memorable.
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