Can you believe it’s been nearly 20 years since Spike Lee and Denzel Washington last worked together? Even crazier, can you believe that Highest 2 Lowest, their latest collaboration, is only the fifth time they’ve teamed up (If you’re counting at home, that’s Mo’ Better Blues, Malcolm X, He Got Game, and Inside Man)?
If you can’t tell from that list of features, Denzel and Spike working together is a recipe for success, and this remake of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low — widely acclaimed as one of the greatest thrillers of all time — seems to strike all of the right notes, and we don’t just mean that horn section from James Brown’s “The Payback.” That’s the soundtrack for the brief teaser that A24 dropped on Monday morning, and it’ll take your day back on the job from Lowest 2 Highest.
Peep it:
Here’s a synopsis for Highest 2 Lowest:
“When a titan music mogul (Denzel Washington), widely known as having the ‘best ears in the business,’ is targeted with a ransom plot, he is jammed up in a life-or-death moral dilemma. 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.”
Highest 2 Lowest hits theaters on August 22, though it’ll arrive around two weeks later (on September 5, to be precise) on Apple TV+. Not that we really have to tell you this, but you should go see a Spike Lee movie in a movie theater. Da 5 Bloods and that David Byrne doc were the COVID-era exceptions to the rule.