Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest arrives not as a quiet homage but as a theatrical proclamation: a loud, colour-saturated reworking of Kurosawa’s High and Low that trades the original’s surgical restraint for spectacle. On paper the ingredients are promising — Denzel Washington returning to Lee’s orbit, a city-sized moral dilemma, and the director’s appetite for music, race and swagger. In practice the film too often substitutes signal for nuance: big gestures where small ones were required, anthemic “coolness” where moral complexity might have lived, and a directorial itch to be seen as culturally vital that winds up feeling performative.
There are individual pleasures. Washington can still carry a scene on the weight of a look, and Lee’s kinetic camera and production-design choices make New York feel lived-in and loudly proud — the film’s visual and sonic textures are an argument for itself. But the pleasures are intermittent and frequently undermined by choices that reveal sloppy dramaturgy: dialogue that rings false, characters written as archetypes rather than people, and a dramaturgical architecture that favours rhetorical set-pieces over coherent psychological logic. The result is a film that wants to be many things — thriller, social critique, cultural scrapbook — and while it ends up being all of them, it does so in half-measures.
Dialogue and characterisation are the film’s soft underbelly. Too often lines exist to signpost themes or elicit applause rather than to reveal interior life. Characters announce themselves (and occasionally the film’s thesis) with the bluntness of a speechwriter: pronouncements about legacy, power, or Black culture land as slogans, not discoveries. In Kurosawa’s original the moral problem accumulates through behaviour; here it is fed to us as text. That shift makes the film feel didactic — even, at times, stagey — and it robs the actors of the chance to surprise us. When Washington is given real music to play — a private beat, a trembling pause — the movie stirs. Those moments are too rare, and fleeting.
Directing, for all its bravado, often looks defensive. Lee leans into hammy theatricality — enlarged pauses, broad emotional crescendos, editorial punctuation by way of music and cutaways — as if volume could substitute for argument. Filmmakers of Lee’s stature can of course choose operatic artifice; the problem here is inconsistency. The film will modulate from intimate to operatic in the same scene, denying the audience a tonal anchor. When a director lurches towards melodrama to prove a point, the result can be invigorating — if it’s intentional and architected. In Highest 2 Lowest it too often feels like a reflex: escalate, punctuate, repeat. The conceit of being “cool” — an aesthetic shorthand Lee routinely wields — sometimes reads as performance rather than meaning, an insistence that identity and swagger alone can carry thematic weight.
There is, uncomfortably, an over-reliance on cultural shorthand. The film wears its Blackness proudly and vivid cultural markers are a strength when they are woven into character and context; but there are stretches where Black cultural signifiers are treated as visual and sonic authority rather than as the basis of dramatic interrogation. Pop-culture cameos, curated art on penthouse walls, and soundtrack moments announce identity, but rarely interrogate it. The film’s self-assured “cool” sometimes tips into a defensive posturing: if the camera insists you recognise how very stylish and very Black everything is, then the cinema has ceased to be an invitation and become a proclamation. That posture can be energising — Lee has always celebrated culture — but here it occasionally anaesthetises moral engagement.
Critically, the film’s ethics are muddied by performance choices. When a moral puzzle requires subtlety, the screenplay hands actors broad cover: decisions look like moral theatre rather than the agonising, ambiguous acts Kurosawa mined. When the plot requires doubt, Lee substitutes swagger; when it requires introspection, the camera stages monologues. The consequence is that the film’s centre never quite holds. You’re left admiring individual performances and design flourishes while the argument — the emotional and ethical throughline — drifts like a balloon released from a rooftop. Reviewers have been split: some praise Lee’s energy and Washington’s presence; others, harsher, argue the film’s choices fatally misread the source material’s economy. Those schisms feel accurate.
Stylistically, the editing and soundtrack do the film both favours and disservices. Lee’s ear for rhythm — his longstanding coupling of music and movement — gives the film moments of real propulsion. But there are sequences where editorial bravura becomes cover for narrative laziness: music and rapid cutting paper over lapses in plotting and character logic, creating an illusion of forward motion without the corresponding internal momentum. It’s one thing to energise a scene with a killer track; it’s another to use the track as shorthand for emotional complexity. This film does both, sometimes in the same breath, and the mismatch is telling.
Ultimately, Highest 2 Lowest is a movie of surfaces that can still be enjoyed on those surfaces — a bravura turn from Washington, a designer’s love-letter to New York culture, a soundtrack that bangs. But as a moral thriller, as a careful reappraisal of Kurosawa’s cold, austere moralism, it is a disappointment. Spike Lee remains a filmmaker with vital instincts and a bravado that can still exhilarate; here, too often, those instincts are muffled beneath hammy theatricality, rhetorical dialogue, and an overconfident reliance on cultural swagger. There’s a great film hidden under the noise — leaner, quieter, more ready to trust its characters. As it stands, Highest 2 Lowest is audacious and watchable, and yet frustratingly unsteady: a spirited misfire from a director who has earned the right to be less demonstrative and more exacting.
6/10
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