Film Club: Highest 2 Lowest (Spike Lee, 2025)

So, I watched the film yesterday and quite enjoyed it. It’s faithful both to the original and Spike Lee. You can see the Kurosawa but you can feel the Lee. The first half follows High and Low more closely while the second half plays looser with the source material. Both films raise questions about the world in which they were made and naturally those questions are quite different.

I particularly liked how music is used in the film: as a plot device, social commentary and the way the score changes in style as King moves from high-rise society to the street level and below. The money handover sequence is really well done and orchestrated with music. In many other places, the score felt obnoxious and out of place, but I felt that it was intentional.

In addition to the change in music, the film gets tighter the further it progresses in terms of both its pacing and its framing. This is somewhat similar to Kurosawa’s, although I would say that Kurosawa’s city trip in the second half is more memorable and impactful.

The encounter between King and the kidnapper in the recording studio is a great scene. That said, I would perhaps have had it entirely replace the end of the film scene in prison, or it would at least have been nice to have a little bit more of a contrast between the two.

I generally love Spike Lee’s films for their balanced quirkiness and inventiveness but also feel that in his works, storylines tend to get reduced to structures on which to hang ideas and commentary. It’s the same with Highest 2 Lowest where things again seem to conveniently happen to both the characters and the audience, rather than any of us being active agents in the story that is being told. That said, I used to be more bothered by this than I am these days.

It is also evident that this is a work of a filmmaker who started their career in the 1980s. Many of the choices in framing, tempo and particularly character portrayal felt a little dated to me, but not always in a bad way. Still, one could perhaps take issue about the cardboard cut-out cops and the one-dimensionality of King’s wife. I also missed the balance and point of view that Tatsuya Nakadai’s chief detective character offered in the original, but I can understand the change. Denzel Washington gives a great performance.

It was lovely to see the Kurosawa Production logo at the very beginning and Lee’s nod to Kurosawa in the end credits.

Huzzah to Kurosawa Film Club!

The (perhaps) intentionally-bad score really ruined this one for me on the whole, particularly since so much of the plot and themes of the film revolve around an old man who hasn’t lose his ear for a good tune. Also, why does the film open up with a number from OKLAHOMA? It’s not like his character is a fan of musicals.

Vili, I do agree with you that the studio scene is a major highlight and a nice version of the scene from Kurosawa’s original ending. I also found Denzel Washington’s performance to be largely autopilot for this one except for those scenes when he interacted with A$AP Rocky’s kidnapper. I never believed there was any affection between him and Jeffrey Wright’s character and I found David and his whole family largely unlikable. Though, like the cheesy, overbearing music, I didn’t see to what end. Neither the reason for all the Biblically-named characters.

Compared to the MAGNIFICENT SEVEN remake from a few years back, also with Denzel (oof), I enjoyed this remake more. At least it had some of Spike’s distinctive flourishes and an appearance from the late Eddie Palmieri. The rest of it seemed all very first-draft to me. That being said, it was the kind of viewing experience that activated my critical thinking and motivated me to make headway on my own stuff, so not a waste by any means.

My wife teaches theater classes to middle and high school aged students so every show she does we will put HIGH & LOW on the television to absorb the glorious blocking and movement storytelling in that opening half. So I can say I’ve at least watched that a good half dozen times since 2019.

Otherwise for me it has been working, aging and surviving. I hope you are well, Vili, along with the rest of you Friends of AK.

Cheers.

Also, why does the film open up with a number from OKLAHOMA?

Indeed. I don’t really know the answer but I feel that there are a number of interesting things going on there:

– On the most basic level, one could argue that the song’s lyrics pretty much set up the scene and the story. It really is a beautiful morning and at this point, King feels that everything is indeed going his way. The song tells us that all the sounds of the earth are like music, which to King’s ears they probably are. Sure, it’s also a song about a farm, but notably when we get to the line about all the cattle standing like statues, what we see on the screen are high-rise buildings standing like statues. A traditional American economic symbol contrasted with a modern one.

– The song also creates a contrast of cultural identity. I think it would be fair to call Oklahoma a fairly white musical. And I think it would also be fair to say that Spike Lee’s filmography is not particularly white, and that it often specifically seeks to offer a contrast to the kind of stories of whiteness that Oklahoma represents. Lee here claims the song for his own purposes and uses a recording by a black actor and singer (Norm Lewis) who I believe has been a notable force in championing racial equity in theatre.

– But perhaps this cultural contrast also illustrates King’s position at the beginning of the film. As his wife later points out, he no longer seems to be excited about the music that he works with. Oklahoma, like a lot of the film’s more traditional (or dated) score in the first half of the film, seems out of place. As if purposefully a little obnoxious. This begins to change as the events that unfold force King to wake up. The film’s soundtrack seems to follow this journey. Interestingly, at the end, it is no longer a contrast between black and white, but something else. King rejects Young Felon’s offers as false and thus avoids returning back to where the story started (in spirit, if not musically), and instead the film concludes with a song that is more aligned with King’s own musical tastes. I believe what we hear in the final scene is actually a live recording of the vocal that was done on set. King has dropped the artifice. This I feel connects to one of the main themes of the film: the exploration of art, identity and artistic integrity.

– Finally, perhaps having Oklahoma’s “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'” open the film is also intended to signal what type of a film we are about to see. In two ways, actually. A little like a musical, Highest 2 Lowest primarily operates in heightened, stylised reality throughout the film. And I think the song also signals to the viewer from the get go that this is, indeed, meant as a film, a piece of fiction with a strong narrator’s voice. Or that’s anyway what my first reaction was when the opening titles rolled.

it was the kind of viewing experience that activated my critical thinking and motivated me to make headway on my own stuff, so not a waste by any means.

Same here! The film gave me a boost creatively and that has been further fed this week by a local film festival that features the Canadian directors Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg talking about their films together with the miracle producer Robert Lantos. I saw Egoyan’s Ararat the other night, and although I must have seen the film something like a dozen times in the past twenty years, I was once again swept away by the sheer brilliance of it.

I hope you are well, Vili

I am, thank you for asking! Life’s been weird recently but it’s also forced me to make some bigger decisions and I think those decisions have been and will be fruitful. It’s a bit of a transitional period for me at the moment but I feel the direction is exciting.

I really wanted to like this film but to say I was disappointed would be an understatement. It started off well and proceeded to go downhill at an ever increasing speed, finally ending with one of the most meaningless “non-endings” I have ever seen.
The acting was, at best, perfunctory. I never felt Denzel was doing anything other than going through the motions, reading a script, not invested in his character at all. There was a scene toward the beginning where he is upstairs when the phone rings and he has to go down a flight to pick it up. His movements were not those of a man rushing to save his son, they were those of an actor making sure he didn’t break his neck, it looked fake, and that wasn’t the only time a scene looked like that, a scene in a film, not a recreation of real life. I thought he acted much better in any of the Equalizer films, cartoons that they are, which says a great deal.
I could write a great deal more but to do it justice I would have to rewatch the film, take notes, and really think about it in detail, but to what end? I do appreciate the opportunity to offer my thoughts.

Thanks for your thoughts, chomei! It’s really interesting how differently different films work for different people. I personally thought that Denzel’s performance was brilliant and I even remember thinking that his body language coming down those stairs was a great mixture of a man trying to be in control of a situation that he doesn’t really care about. But perhaps we are thinking about different scenes, as the one I remember is at a point when he already knows that the kidnapper got the wrong boy.

Anyway, I can definitely see why the film doesn’t work for everyone. It’s a little all over the place at times, but that’s also partly why I personally liked it so much.