Denzel Washington, Spike Lee Reunite in Highest 2 Lowest Trailer: ‘Can You Handle It'?
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, which arrives in select theaters August 22 and Apple TV+ on September 5, finds Washington monoluging about money and modern life over the swaggering sounds of James Brown's "The Big 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.'
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The creative partnership between Spike Lee and Denzel Washington is so strong that the A24 release calls them "brothers", noting "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:
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 window, and walking hurriedly through a parking garage.
We also see A$AP Rocky's character walking into a courtroom, past demonstrators, in a moment that eerily recalls the rapper's recent legal travails: He was found not guilty in February on two felony counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm. After a three-week trial, jurors deliberated just three hours before reachign the verdict for Rocky, whose legal name is Rakim Mayers.
In the Highest 2 Lowest trailer, A$AP Rocky's character enters the courtroom as fans hold signs that read "Free Yung Felon" and "Justice 4 Yung Felon."
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?"
Denzel Washington and Spike Lee first collaborated on Lee's 1990 Mo' Better Blues, and had their most iconic collaboration in 1992's Malcolm X, which earned Washington a Best Actor Oscar. Their most recent collaboration was 2006's Inside Man.
Main image: Denzel Washington in Highest 2 Lowest, directed by Spike Lee. A24.
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