The fifth collaboration between director Spike Lee and actor Denzel Washington has its faults, both aesthetically and in terms of problematic content. Pervasive language and some nearly exposed behinds give this film a strong caution. But those problems serve a narrative purpose, too.
Stackin’ Hits began with music: Pure. Soulful. Beautiful.
David King launched the label with little but his two golden ears. But oh, those ears. They could hear a Top 40 smash from across a room. They could find a budding superstar in a parking garage. For much of the 1990s and into the 21st century, David’s ears found the Next Big Thing. And the Next. And the Next.
Then everything changed. People stopped buying records and collected—then streamed—melodic strands of data. People stopped finding the Next Big Thing through a record label and started finding it on TikTok. Artificial intelligence horned in on the action, too, turning the heart and soul of songwriting into a binary calculus.
And somewhere in there, David changed, too. The dollar sign eclipsed the cleft note. The business of music gobbled up the love of it. Stackin’ Hits became a full-blown commercial enterprise, backed by a board with deep pockets.
David’s still rich. He can still write six-figure checks to charities without blinking. He’s built more than a business: He’s built a family, too, including wife Pam and his 17-year-old son, Trey. But it’s not enough. He’s not ready to let his golden ears rest. David—King David, they called him—wants his musical kingdom back. And he’s ready to pay dearly for the privilege.
But even as he teeters on the cusp of reclaiming control of Stackin’ Hits, David’s world is rocked by a phone call.
He answers it. The man on the other end tells David that he’s kidnapped Trey. The ransom? A mere $17.5 million.
Even for David King, that’s a lot of money. It’ll wipe out his bank accounts. Force the sale of his New York penthouse. Take the David family back down to the ground floor. And it’ll definitely be the end of David’s bid to reclaim control of Stackin’ Hits.
But that’s OK. David’s willing to pay the ransom. It’s his son. Of course he’ll pay.
But what if the kidnapped teen in question isn’t Trey? What then? Will David be willing to let the boy die so his business deal might live?
[Note: Spoilers are contained in the following sections.]
We hear a television reporter call David a “devoted family man and philanthropist,” and both of those descriptions fit.
David and his wife have tried to foster and monetarily support “Black culture and artistic integrity,” and he annually writes massive checks to charitable enterprises. He rides with son, Trey, on the way to Trey’s basketball camp, encouraging him not to spend so much time on his phone. When Trey insists that he needs to get more followers, David offers an insightful question: “Where are you leading them to?” He clearly has a lot of love for both his wife and son. And if you subtract David’s Rolls Royce and posh penthouse and $500,000 checks to charity, their shared life feels reasonably normal.
Paul is David’s chauffer and, seemingly, his closest friend, an ex-con whom David took in and almost treats as family. Paul acknowledges the debt he owes the music mogul: Without David’s help, who knows where Paul and his teen son, Kyle, would be. David shows would-be music stars some courtesy too—stopping for a minute to listen to one woman sing for him.
Even as David encourages some of his business partners to vote with, him or sell their shares to him, he frames it as an ethical decision. “There’s more to life than just money,” he says. “There’s integrity.”
Granted, the movie pushes David into an uncomfortable spot: His own integrity is stretched and nearly broken. But he ultimately finds his way back. And without giving too much away, David almost seems to try to coach the kidnapper into being a better person.
Director Spike Lee and actor Denzel Washington (one of Hollywood’s most outspoken Christians) certainly didn’t pull the name “David King” out of a vacuum. I believe the film contains purposeful echoes to the biblical King David. Just as Israel’s King David—a man after God’s own heart—lost himself in his desire for Bathsheba, so David King is seduced by the promise of new power. And (the movie suggests) he nearly sacrifices his cinematic soul to pursue it. As the biblical David stole another man’s wife, destroying her husband in the process, so this David nearly allows another man’s son to be stolen. And it nearly destroys the father.
The movie suggests that David King has a history with—and likely an affinity for—Christianity. It’s not just the diamond-studded cross that he sometimes wears around his neck (which the movie takes pains to emphasize), but the fact that he sometimes punctuates his thoughts, or the thoughts of others, with the word “amen.” (At the end of a musical audition, David says, “And the church said …” leaving an opening for the obligatory “amen.”) When he asks Trey about where he’s leading his social media followers to, Trey responds, “The Promised Land.” David says, “The Promised Land? You a preacher now?”
Other people seem to hold at least a nominal faith, too. When it’s discovered that Trey is safe, his mom (Pam) utters a very sincere, “Thank You God!” David talks to a woman wearing a cross who also expresses her belief that God is always at work—and perhaps responsible for bringing David to her door.
Paul, for his part, appears to be Muslim. He wears a kufi, and we see him pray in a couple of scenes. During one apparent prayer, he holds his hands out in front of him, palms up; in another, more explicit nod to Islam, he prays as he repeatedly kneels and presses his forehead to the floor.
In a surreal scene that mimics a music video, several female dancers shake their ample, and mostly exposed, rear ends to the camera. (All the dancers appear to be wearing thongs-like garments.) The dancers all wear clothes that expose a great deal of skin elsewhere, too, and one covers her nipples with only a pair of glitter-festooned stars. (In another scene, a woman wears an outfit that exposes quite a bit of cleavage.)
Trey wants his father to listen to an audition recording from a woman named Sufa. When David asks why—is she that good or is Trey that romantically interested in her—Trey admits it’s a little bit of both. He tells his pop that he wants to “hook up” with her. And when David asks for clarification on what he means by the phrase, Trey insists that he just wants to hang out with her.
We see a teen boy tied up in a bathtub, blood from his nose running down the tape covering his mouth. We later see him unbound, and his face is pretty bruised.
People point and sometimes fire guns. The bullets fly into glass, not flesh—but that glass does injure someone’s eye. (The scene isn’t particularly grotesque, but we later see the victim’s eye covered with a bandage.) Two men fight; one eventually beats and stomps the other into submission. A man is grabbed and dragged. People drive recklessly, in cars and motorcycles, through crowds.
David “shoots” people with his finger—then uses that same finger gun on himself. He shows someone a grenade he keeps near his desk, saying that he thought about pulling the pin sometimes during his career.
These are likely under-estimates, but I heard at least 75 f-words (many paired with the word “mother”), 40 s-words and more than 50 uses of the n-word. The scriptwriters wanted to give some other curses a little airtime, too, and so we hear “a–,” “b–ch,” “d–n,” “h—,” “p-ssy,” “d–k” and one possible use of the slur “f-g.” God’s name is misused about 10 times (half with “d–n”), and Jesus’ name is abused once.
Yankees’ fans on a subway are very insistent that the Red Sox “suck.”
A rapper and his producer both smoke marijuana during a recording session. Someone remembers smelling “weed” in the kidnapper’s lair.
As I hinted at above, the kidnapper made a mistake: Trey wasn’t the one taken, but Kyle, Paul’s son, instead. But the kidnapper insists on the same ransom anyway. And while David and Pam were more than willing to pay $17.5 million for Trey, David initially refuses to pay the ransom for his best friend’s boy.
Paul begs. David’s business partner pleads, knowing how refusing the ransom will make David look. Trey is horrified that his father won’t pay to save his best friend’s life. “Best ears in the business,” he says, “but the coldest heart.” (David ultimately relents.)
But even when he pays the ransom—and as the press trumpets his generosity and courage—his business seems to fall apart because of it: The money he used to ransom Kyle was earmarked for the business deal, and how his financial backers are throwing around the word “fraud,” demanding payment in two weeks.
A couple of people take the law into their own hands.
Director Spike Lee and actor Denzel Washington have a long history of working together. They first collaborated on 1990’s Mo’ Better Blues—the first of five movies on which they’ve teamed up. And rumor has it that Highest 2 Lowest might not be their last.
But should it be?
Highest 2 Lowest—a rather loving remake of the 1963 classic High and Low from legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa—offers plenty of strong messages to chew on. Kurosawa is known for exploring themes of justice and redemption, and many of his main characters face what would seem to be no-win moral choices. Highest 2 Lowest fits that ethos. And the charismatic Washington, so adept at playing characters with both the highest and lowest of principles, gives David King believability and depth.
But Lee also wants to examine our social media age—where success is weighed in followers and clicks, and where one’s online reputation can make or break you. It drills into a paradox very much at home in the 21st century: how being a bad guy in the real world can pay off big in the virtual one. “Attention is the biggest form of currency,” we hear. And that can be all too true.
That message gives Highest 2 Lowest a curiously old-fashioned vibe. The film begins with a lecture on screen time and, in some ways, that lecture never stops. It trumpets the virtues of an age gone by: King’s home is festooned with pictures of jazz, rock and R&B legends. And you can almost feel Spike Lee sadly shaking his head as the movie breaks out its rap tracks—emphasizing their vapid lyrics with a purposefully wince-inducing, morally bankrupt music video.
And that brings us to the movie’s biggest content drawback, but one that comes with an interesting wrinkle: the language.
With a couple of exceptions, Lee’s directorial catalog is largely R-rated—much of the time for language. That’s certainly the case in Highest 2 Lowest. But here, Lee seems to use language to emphasize the decline of both music and society. Early on, when David’s on top of the world, the script is largely profanity free. But once our kidnapper is introduced, the mood—and the language—changes. Every other word out of his mouth is a cussword. And the closer David is to the kidnapper, the more profane he becomes, too.
Highest 2 Lowest is, then, a fitting title for what we see. When David’s at his highest point—literally standing on his penthouse deck, his reputation intact and his beautiful family nearby—his integrity is at its highest, too. But in the end, he descends into a dank, dark honeycomb of underground tunnel. It’s a metaphorical underworld representing David’s life, and his hopes, at their lowest. His language follows suit. To make it out of that dark space, he must, on some level, reach higher.
Highest 2 Lowest should be approached with definite caution. The content here can be extreme. But it does come with a purpose, too.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
