Akira Kurosawa, the legendary Japanese filmmaker, has long inspired American remakes. After his masterpiece Seven Samurai was transformed into The Magnificent Seven starring Yul Brynner, Spike Lee now reinterprets the classic High and Low (Between Heaven and Hell), which he himself describes as a “reinterpretation”.
The story follows a wealthy music mogul whose chauffeur’s child is kidnapped by mistake instead of his own son. The kidnappers demand ransom, and the protagonist faces a moral dilemma: protect his empire or save his friend’s child. The narrative, oscillating between social drama and moral fable, sometimes tips into caricature.
From the very first scenes, with sweeping aerial shots of New York, the tone is set. Spike Lee reunites with his longtime collaborator Denzel Washington for their fifth film together, building a fable around an African-American man who has achieved everything. Some scenes feel weighed down by an overly “majestic” approach, yet the film embraces its ambition: Highest 2 Lowest is not a David Simon-style documentary, nor a fiery polemic like Malcolm X, but a modern fable where characters occasionally verge on caricature.
With BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee had already toyed with second-degree humor. Here, in this big-budget production, some viewers feel he goes too far. The sequences where he sits in his living room, addressing portraits of iconic African-American cultural figures as he weighs whether to pay the ransom, border on parody. But perhaps that’s exactly what the critics missed: Highest 2 Lowest is his most openly “mainstream” film, his studio showcase.
The film was made with far greater resources than most of Spike Lee’s past projects. While rumors place the budget around $60 million, no official figure has been confirmed. The inclusion of A$AP Rocky in the cast, alongside the release of the single Trunk, added to the buzz—especially given the rapper’s relatively low musical output in recent years.
Spike Lee seems to have had less freedom here than in his previous films. Highest 2 Lowest is undeniably his most “mainstream” work: a spectacular fable whose central ideological thrust is the story of a wealthy African-American hero in Trump’s America, a country deeply fractured. The irony is striking: unlike his protagonist, who abandons his empire to start a small label, Spike Lee has taken the opposite path. After years of releasing more independent films, his partnership with Apple TV+ has carried him, quite literally, “from Lowest to Highest”.
