Can you handle the mayhem, the money, the success, the failure, the lovers, the memes, and everything in between?
The first trailer for just dropped for Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, and it’s asking viewers: “Can you handle it?” That “it” could also refer to Lee and Washington teaming up for the fifth time.
Set on the mean streets of New York City, the film follows a music titan (Denzel Washington), who gets caught up in a life-or-death moral dilemma of whether to further his career or save his child’s life, after finding himself the target of a ransom plot.
“There’s more to life than making money,” Washington narrates in the trailer. “There’s integrity. There’s what you stand for. There’s what you actually believe.”
Loosely based on Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 crime thriller High and Low, which was adapted from Ed McBain’s 1959 novel King’s Ransom, the film also stars A$AP Rocky, Jeffrey Wright, Ilfenesh Hadera, and rapper Ice Spice.
Highest 2 Lowest is the first collaboration between Lee and Washington in over 20 years, although their fifth in total, as the pair previously worked together on Malcom X, Mo’ Better Blues, He Got Game, and Inside Man.
Instead of waiting for A24, who posted on X that the Highest 2 Lowest trailer would debut on May 6, Lee posted it to his Instagram, writing “I Know U Have Been Waiting ‘HELLA LONG.’
Set to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on May 9 and hitting theaters on Aug. 22, Highest 2 Lowest looks like it’s going to be one hell of a ride.
Think you can handle it?
