In 1963, Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa—already a globally-recognized icon for works like Rashomon (1950), Seven Samurai (1954), and Throne of Blood (1957)—released a film based on King’s Ransom, a not-very-good pulp novel by the US mystery writer Ed McBain. That film, High and Low, stars Kurosawa’s long-time collaborator, the actor Toshiro Mifune. It's a noir film, an art film, a social realist fever dream about the perils of inequality—and arguably one of the greatest movies made by anybody.
This weekend, in the year 2025, Spike Lee has released his own version of High and Low, starring his long-time collaborator Denzel Washington. It is not one of the greatest movies ever made by anybody. But it is a perfectly good summer film. And if you have the foresight to watch High and Low before checking out Highest 2 Lowest, there's real delight to be found watching the characters and plot lines in each film converge and diverge.
The films are different enough that watching the original won't spoil the adaption. Washington doesn't even try to pull off Mifune’s epic rant about the proper construction of a woman’s dress shoe in Highest 2 Lowest, because he doesn’t even get a chance—Lee and the film’s screenwriter Alan Fox, instead gave Washington’s character David King, the much more manly profession of music executive. But King’s musical skills lead to sharp plot twists that don’t exist in the Kurosawa version. In the role of the main character's chauffeur, Yutaka Sada (in High and Low) and Jeffrey Wright (Highest 2 Lowest) are each brilliant in completely different ways, even as they play variations on the same character.
What Highest 2 Lowest is not, is a Kurosawa film. It’s a warm, nerdy, aesthetic homage, sure. But the actual core—that deep thrum of anxiety and slipperiness that underlies every moment of High and Low—isn’t there.
Kurosawa, like many film directors, came from a privileged background. Unlike many film directors, by the time he began making movies, Kurosawa had truly seen what he describes in his autobiography as “the ability of fear to drive people off the course of human behavior."
In 1923, when Kurosawa was 13 years old, much of Tokyo and its suburbs were destroyed by the Great Kanto earthquake. In the following weeks, roving gangs—some police, some civilians—took advantage of the chaos following the earthquake to murder people. Some were people that these folks had been looking for an opportunity to kill (leftists, feminists, Tokyo’s ethnic Korean population) and others just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. At one point, Kurosawa’s father was surrounded by a group of men and narrowly talked his way back into safety. The men had developed a theory that, because Kurosawa’s father had facial hair, he might be Korean, and they appeared excited at the prospect of beating him to death.
After that came a little something called World War II. Kurosawa managed to escape military service only because a doctor who was fond of Kurosawa’s father, classified the younger Kurosawa as so spectacularly useless that he avoided conscription even when children and old men were being forced onto the battlefield.
In Kurosawa’s films, how others perceive a person is, repeatedly, a matter of life or death. This shows up in High and Low's deeply egalitarian character portraits. Someone who initially seems like the protagonist disappears for a long stretch of the film. Every character is as vivid and unique as if they were the star of their own movie. The woman in the bouffant hairdo who sells heroin at the dance hall where the American GIs hang out blazes across the screen in the few seconds she’s there. The same is true of the operator of the local incinerator and the official who knows all the train schedules. When one actor with a small part delivered a particularly good performance in High and Low, Kurosawa rewrote the ending around him.
Highest 2 Lowest, is, well, more of a movie. There are only two stars, and those stars are Wright and Washington. The summer of 2025 has been marked by people across the US being taken off the street, detained, and often deported into situations where their lives are in danger, on the basis of how they look. Rather than proving commentary on this, Highest 2 Lowest is arguably more of a film to go to an air-conditioned theater on a hot afternoon and enjoy with your friends.
Your enjoyment of Highest 2 Lowest will likely hinge on a handful of things: If you, like Spike Lee, delight in chase scenes, New York City, making fun of Boston sports fans, dad humor, cheerfully blatant partnerships with luxury brands, the song “Oh What a Beautiful Morning!” and most of all, the dream team that is Denzel Washington and Jeffery Wright, you will find enough to enjoy here to carry you through other aspects, like the too-loud, strangely-syrupy score in the first half of the film. Lee is notorious for mixing his scores to the point where they can drown out dialogue, so hardcore fans will be expecting this. Also bothersome: the way the women characters are allotted exactly one micron of sassy dialogue before reverting to deference.
And if you ever want to see the perfect Spike Lee joint with Kurosawa vibes film, that’s easy enough to watch—it's already made. That film is Do the Right Thing, and it’s also, arguably, one of the greatest movies made by anybody.
Highest 2 Lowest opens today, playing in wide release, 133 minutes, rated R.
