Highest 2 Lowest (2025)

[nicwood]

I absolutely loved this one and have now watched it two days in a row. This is such a fun experience and a lot of it is due to Denzel Washington, Spike Lee and A$AP Rocky clearly having a great time. Lee is hit or miss for me but I do admire his idiosyncrasies and passion he imbues most of his films with even when he indulges at the expense of tighter editing, focused narratives etc. I love his films the most when he manages to weave his interests and “messaging” into an entertaining, fun, more classically cinematic canvas, such as with BlacKkKlansman, Da 5 Bloods and now Highest 2 Lowest. There are many great points in this thread already but one more observation regarding the score. I do agree that the wall-to-wall ambient music in his films can be very annoying when it doesn’t contribute anything to the story, atmosphere etc. (such as in Da Sweet Blood of Jesus) but Highest 2 Lowest is one of the least offensive offenders. When Lee uses ambient music here, which is usually a mixture of the kind of piano solos he drenched his 2010s low-fi digital films with and an orchestral score, he actually gives it some purpose and lets the music carry on and flow into the next scene or a montage for a few beats. An example is after the conversation between King and his son in the latter’s bedroom. After being familiar with Lee’s other films, I found myself surprised that he managed to either restrain himself with the music or someone gave him good notes and he listened. A shame that this’ll be buried on Apple just like it never really played theatrically.

[PNguyen]

I found this remake highly disrespectful and was the lowest form of filmmaking from Spike Lee. Yes, even worse than Oldboy 2013 by a lot because at least that movie was terrible in a so bad, it's good way while this movie was incredibly frustrating and felt sluggish. It felt a whole hour longer than the original while being 10 minutes shorter. This was just a mess with little entertainment value, Denzel Washington and Jeffrey Wright tried to carry this movie, but unfortunately it was doomed from the start. This felt like a first draft of a screenplay that never went through edits, just copies and paste the moral dilemma of the original while trying to add some social commentary on the music industry, but ultimately said nothing of substance. It featured similar issues with something like Eddington where it's throwing surface level critiques and then just abandons halfway and tries to do random weird abstract artsy fartsy scenes. Except at least Eddington was well made, this though had so many issues with the editing, sound mixing, and score to the point it ruined 80% of the movie.