Hollywood doesn't know what do to with Spike Lee

‘Highest 2 Lowest’ is a punchy thriller that features one of the world’s biggest actors. Its director hasn’t lost his touch, says Xan Brooks, but he’s being forced to the margins again

- By Xan Brooks

It's hard to tell what qualifies as a Hollywood success story these days, let alone what might count as an honest-to-God happy ending. Case in point: Shelton Jackson "Spike" Lee, the onetime insurgent of American movies, whose career has played out as a rousing vindication of pretty much everything he's said and done down the years.

Lee, now 68, is a national treasure, arguably as much an identifiable brand name as Martin Scorsese, David Lynch and Steven Spielberg. But the business model has shifted away from his style of picture, which means that he's out on the margins again. He's like the firebrand revolutionary who marches triumphantly up the palace steps only to find the place deserted and the stateroom in dust-sheets.

Lee's new film - Highest 2 Lowest - is a glossy, punchy New York kidnap thriller, complete with swooping aerial shots of Lower Manhattan and a powerhouse turn from Denzel Washington as the everyman hero turned angel of vengeance.

That ought to be enough to make Highest 2 Lowest a big deal, a summer event movie, so it's curious to note the lack of buzz and promotion around it, and stranger still to realise that this is part of a pattern.

Highest 2 Lowest has at least been given a limited theatrical run ahead of its 5 September debut on AppleTV+; Lee's previous release the Vietnam war drama Da 5 Bloods (2020) - bypassed cinemas altogether and went straight to Netflix.

The sight of a high-profile picture being thrown like chum to the home entertainment crowd would once have set alarm bells ringing. Here was a tacit admission on the part of the backers that something had gone horribly wrong in production; an early indication that the film was either a flat-out stinker or an arthouse curio deemed to be too jaggedly experimental for mainstream public tastes.