Spike Lee and Denzel Washington team up again for Highest 2 Lowest, a crime thriller that puts the partners on Mo’ Better Blues, Malcolm X, He Got Game and Inside Man back in familiar territory: a jumpy, vibrant New York City.
The A24 film and Apple Original Films release, which arrives in select theaters August 22 and Apple TV+ on September 5, finds Washington monologuing about money and modern life over the swaggering sounds of James Brown’s “The Payback.” The stellar cast also includes Jeffrey Wright, Ilfenesh Hadera, and A$AP Rocky.
The film is about a titan music mogul (Denzel Washington), who is widely known for having the “best ears in the business.”
The creative partnership between Lee and Washington is so strong that the A24 release calls them “brothers,” explaining:
“Brothers Denzel Washington and Spike Lee reunite for the 5th in their long working relationship for a reinterpretation of the great filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s crime thriller High and Low, now played out on the mean streets of modern day New York City.”
The tagline: “All $$ Ain’t Good $$.”
Here’s the poster:
Denzel Washington, Spike Lee and Highest 2 Lowest Trailer Details
It’s one of the most kinetic, fast-moving trailers we’ve seen in years, and the visuals are fabulous: We see Denzel Washington in a suit, strolling past gold and platinum records, wearing gold headphones as he looks out a skyscraper office window, and walking hurriedly through a parking garage.
We also see A$AP Rocky’s character walking into a courtroom, past demonstrators, in a moment that eerily recalls the rapper’s recent legal travails: He was found not guilty in February on two felony counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm. After a three-week trial, jurors deliberated just three hours before reachign the verdict for Rocky, whose legal name is Rakim Mayers.
In the trailer, A$AP Rocky’s character enters the courtroom as fans hold signs that read “Free Yung Felon” and “Justice 4 Yung Felon.”
Also Read: Spike Lee — Things I’ve Learned as a Moviemaker
Other striking visuals include a Puerto Rican Day parade, cop cars with sirens blaring, a bag changing hands, and some subway action.
Washington’s fast-paced monologue in the Highest 2 Lowest trailer recalls Spike Lee movie monologues at their best, including Ed Norton’s rip-roaring tirade against his fellow New Yorkers in Lee’s masterful 2022 film The 25th Hour.
It culminates in Washington’s character asking: “Can you handle the mayhem, can you handle the money, can you handle the success, can you handle the failure, can you handle the lovers, can you handle the memes, can you handle anything that there is in-between?
“That’s the question I have for you: Can you handle it?”
Washington and Lee first collaborated on Lee’s 1990 Mo’ Better Blues, about a troubled jazz trumpeter, Bleek Gilliam, played by Washington. They enjoyed their most iconic and memorable collaboration with 1992’s Malcolm X, which earned Washington a Best Actor Oscar for his stunning portrayal of the transformation of Malcolm Little into Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X, and eventually into the leader of his own group, the Organization of Afro-American Unity.
In He Got Game, Washington unforgettably played Jake Shuttlesworth, a recently paroled father trying to steer his son, Jesus (Ray Allen), to play basketball at the governor’s alma mater.
Their most recent collaboration was 2006’s Inside Man, in which Washington played an NYPD negotiator trying to outmaneuver a criminal mastermind (Clive Owen) and his team as they seek an item in a safety deposit box.
Washington is a two-time Oscar winner for Glory and Training Day, while Lee shared an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2019 for BlackkKlandman, which was nominated for Best Picture. Prior to Highest 2 Lowest, his most recent films were 2020’s Da 5 Bloods and David Byrne’s American Utopia.
Main image: Washington in Highest 2 Lowest. A24.