Highest 2 Lowest (2025)
David King is a music mogul facing a dilemma. Kyle, the son of his employee and close friend and the best friend of his own son, has been kidnapped, mistakenly, when he is confused for King’s son.
The kidnapper is demanding $17.5 million, money King has but money that is necessary for King to buy back his company and save it from being bought out by a rival record company.
King isn’t going to do it. His son, Trey, is understandably upset. But the focus of Trey’s ire isn’t that his father is going to seemingly let his best friend die. It’s how he and his family are going to be perceived on the internet and social media by this controversial decision.
Wait, what?
Spike Lee’s retelling of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 High and Low is both ambitious and imaginative. What it isn’t is plausible nor grounded. Lee is so focused on his many messages and bringing the plot full circle that he doesn’t have time to fully flesh out most of his characters, nor in creating a reality where some of these conversations can plausibly take place or any of these decisions can be reasonably made.
The conversation between Trey and his dad was one of several scenes where Lee attempts to tackle society’s obsession with social media and how we’re perceived by strangers. Early on in the film en route to the basketball camp where the ultimate kidnapping happens, David chastises his son’s obsession with his cell phone before demanding he turn it off for five minutes, and later on when he’s debating whether or not to pay the ransom, he confides in his business partner that the fast-paced nature of the way news stories are consumed make it more likely he’ll be able to survive whatever PR hit he might take if he were to let the kidnapped kid die.
Kurosawa’s 1963 film — itself an adaptation of a 1959 novel by Evan Hunter titled King’s Ransom — was primarily a commentary on class struggle. The ultimate perpetrator of the crime was a lower-class worker envious of the protagonist’s mansion, which sat high up on a hill and that the worker was forced to walk past each and every day.
Lee’s version deals with this to a certain extent, but the problem is that it tries to tackle five other things simultaneously, none of which resonate in a meaningful way.
What Lee does succeed at is creating a love letter to New York City, which is beautifully framed throughout the film. Unfortunately, the characters that occupy these scenes are as fleshed out as a skeleton in Biology class, and the settings and production design lack and semblance of humanistic touch; it’s virtually impossible to envision the Kings living in the penthouse that serves as the setting for a large portion of the film.
Lee has always been an ambitious filmmaker unafraid to make bold choices, and he makes some giant ones here. It’s unfortunate that none of them are given enough time, energy, or purpose to really shine through. It’s a very distracted film, one of the bigger disappointments of the year.