“There’s more to life than just making money. There’s integrity, there’s what you stand for. There’s what you actually believe in,” Denzel Washington tells us over the indelible bassline of James Brown’s revenge classic “The Payback.” It’s the first line spoken in the newly released Highest 2 Lowest teaser trailer, which that immediately spammed my timeline the moment it was surprise-dropped on Spike Lee’s IG grid a day earlier than its planned release. And for good reason, because it certainly appears that, at long last, we got one.
Yes, the Highest 2 Lowest teaser was technically supposed to drop tomorrow, but apparently Spike couldn’t wait another 24 hours to show us what he’s cooked up with his lifetime friend and collaborator after the near 20-year break the director and actor took since 2006’s The Inside Man. It’s an electrifying 51 seconds which gives us much to unpack, built around a propulsive motif of the photo negative Brooklyn Bridge, seemingly seen from inside a convertible speeding across it. (Possibly the Rolls Royce Phantom we briefly see pull up to a curb, and later shot up.). Spike is specifically introduced as the director of the Denzel classics Mo’ Better Blues, Malcolm X, He Got Game, and Inside Man, reminding us that every single time this alliance of filmmaker and actor get together, they make classics.
Even though we’ve been told A$AP Rocky is the star of the film, Denzel is the narrator—addressing the themes of capitalism’s crush ported from Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 source material—and fulcrum of the teaser (including what looks like the mandatory trademark double dolly shot, with Denzel bathed in red light). As we anticipated, his character’s work as a record executive appears to play a prominent role in the film. We see him suave as fuck, swaggering through a corporate office lined with framed platinum records and walking the aforementioned Brooklyn Bridge with what looks like chunky gold Beats headphones on. He’s in full Denzel command here—with echoes of John Creasy, Frank Lucas, and even Malcolm Little—as a slick and chatty high powered executive.
The kidnapping and procedural element of the plot—lifted from Kurosawa’s original—is unfurled via speeding NYPD SUVs, cops working around surveillance equipment in a crisis room, manicured stacks of 1000 Swiss Franc banknotes, and a news report featuring a shot of the actor Bryshere Y. Gray. Gray, who played a rapper on Empire and had not previously been announced as part of the cast, is seen on television as Denzel and a character who looks to be his wife, played by Ilfenesh Hadira, look on from a couch in alarm. Gray appears to be playing Trey King, Jeffrey Wright’s character’s (seen in the trailer with a bushy salt and pepper goatee, oozing with gravitas) mistakenly kidnapped son. There are several cuts to what looks like the drop of those ransomed banknotes in a duffel bag that’s handled by Denzel on a subway train, dropped between cars, and traded off by masked riders on mopeds.
It appears the events take place around June’s annual Puerto Rican Day Parade, with flags waving everywhere in the trailer, a reminder that it’s been 13 years (depending on how you qualify the limited city time we get in 2014’s mostly Martha’s Vineyard-set Da Sweet Blood of Jesus) since one of New York City’s great storytellers has actually shot a film in his hometown. Lee has been on a late period run over the last decade, but by re-teaming with Denzel and returning to New York, this has the looks of the classic Spike Lee Joint we’ve been clamoring for.
While I’d love to be taking in the film’s premiere at Cannes in two weeks, I’ll likely watch Highest 2 Lowest as most of the obsessive nerds who have read this entire primer will: in a packed independent theater on its August 22nd release. The final line in the trailer is Denzel asking, “Can you handle it?” And if he’s referring to the interminable time I am going to have to wait to see this film, the answer is a resounding no.