'Da 5 Bloods': Spike Lee Finally Makes A Worthy, If Bloated, War Epic [Review]

Few comebacks have been as satisfying as what 2018’s “BlacKkKlansman” wrought. The film netted the esteemed and oft-misunderstood director Spike Lee a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, reminding many of his potent cinematic eye. His latest film, the Vietnam War-inspired “Da 5 Bloods,” arrives on Netflix amid the turmoil of protests and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, making it Lee’s most prescient film to date, and at times, his most thematically packed flick. A 40 Acres and a Mule epic, if you will.

Affixed between visual odes to Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” and references to David Lean’s “Bridge on the River Kwai,” ”Da 5 Bloods” most closely resembles John Huston’s “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” with regards to the story. Just like Huston’s classic, a band of men search for gold and are driven into “madness… madness” in the process. However, Lee retrofits the plot into a Vietnam War story of former buddies coming together to find their buried loot—American gold bars they commandeered, originally promised by the CIA to local guerilla warriors in return for fighting the North Vietnamese—and to recover the remains of their long-dead brother Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman).

Upon arriving in present-day Vietnam: Paul (Delroy Lindo); Eddie (Norm Lewis); Otis (Clark Peters); and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) discover a young vibrant and modern country whose glittering skyscrapers, opulent hotels, and streets are littered with capitalist food chains like KFC and McDonalds. Their party is later crashed when Paul’s son David (Jonathan Majors)—a man worried about the welfare of his estranged PTSD wracked father—angles for a cut of the treasure. Together, the quintet’s names draw inspiration from The Temptations’ classic 1964-68 lineup. Lee further infuses “Da 5 Bloods” with Motown influences by composing several scenes around tracks from Marvin Gaye’s 1971 landmark album “What’s Going On.”

Prior to venturing back into Vietnam’s jungles, the team enlist a local Vietnamese guide Vihn (Johnny Tri Nguyen). They also approach Otis’ old flame and a French businessman (Jean Reno) to help launder the money out of the country. Lee’s film is strongest during its first hour, when da bloods reunite. Here, they exist within each other by sharing hilarious yet endearing banter, which expresses the easy chemistry the cast possess.

As a war film, “Da 5 Bloods” only glancingly matches Lee’s prior World War II effort “Miracle at St. Anna.” However, in a myriad of flashbacks; where cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel employs Academy ratio to capture the inescapable dread felt by soldiers entrapped by the conflict and their government—Hanoi Hannah’s (Veronica Ngo) apathetic voice enlivens da bloods. Like Axis Sally in “Miracle at St. Anna,” Hanoi Hannah’s daily radio broadcasts pester the listening Black soldiers to revolt against their white superiors. Ostensibly, Hannah’s words provide a soundboard for several truths: African-Americans were drafted into an immoral war to fight for rights they did not possess at home while subtracting those same rights from the Vietnamese positioned across the battlefield. Meanwhile, during the present-day sequences, Sigel’s widescreen cinematography adapts Vietnam’s surrounding countryside and hills into the frame’s negative space to demonstrate the inescapability of isolation. The transitional editing between Academy ratio and widescreen frequently looks clunky, enjambments barely holding the explosive storylines together.

Stylistically, “Da 5 Bloods” partly resembles “BlacKkKlansman.” Like the former, Lee uses still-photographs of either famous or forgotten African-American icons to illustrate Black history. A montage composed of speeches and historic political events—a Spikeism that perfectly grounds the film—entangles Civil Rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, and Kwame Ture together. Both flicks also explore the struggle faced by Black men when they’re weaponized against communities seeking freedom, running contrary to the Black Power movement of the 1970s. When da bloods come into contact with volunteer landmine diffusers: Seppo (Jasper Pääkkönen) and Simon (Paul Walter Hauser), both actors appeared in “BlacKkKlansman,” and Hedy (Mélanie Thierry)—a French heiress to a family enriched by rubber and rice plantations—Lee confronts the ill-effects of colonialism, too.

However, Lee’s film suffers from languid pacing, partly owing to the epic nearly bursting open from its litany of themes. Yet the topics ring strikingly relevant. Stormin Norm, who Paul and the others treated like a God, referring to him as their “Malcolm and Martin,” expresses the loss of leaders, and the generational death of Black fathers and brothers which significantly affected future generations. That same sense of loss—while he wears a MAGA cap, an example of how Trump’s corrupting rhetoric preys on the vulnerability of the self-thought disaffected—pervades and haunts Paul. “Da 5 Bloods” also discovers a potent ingredient in Paul’s PTSD. Jarringly, in many of the war scenes, Lee did not recast da bloods with younger actors. Instead, it’s the young Norman surrounded by the presently-aged Paul, Melvin, Eddie, and Otis on the battlefields of Vietnam. The sentiment that these men never left the war, and the war never left them, even when they returned home to grapple with their grief, visually works. Barely.

And when the team finally discovers the gold, like the men at the center of “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” Paul descends deeper into fits of madness and paranoia, a metaphorical landmine. During these scenes, when “Da 5 Bloods” basically becomes an action flick, Delroy Lindo offers the best performance of his career, abruptly oscillating from paternal love, to hardened hate, to racist panic attacks, culminating in a series of fourth-wall-breaking monologues teetering between rants and searing soliloquies. Likewise, Jonathan Majors’ turn as Lindo’s son is equally as affecting and multifaceted: painfully presenting the sting of a devoted yet unloved son while bubbling with adventure and wide-eyed wonderment.

Running at 154 minutes, “Da 5 Bloods” is a whole lotta movie, often too bountiful. By the time bandits come onto the scene during the epic’s final act, and one spouts an allusion to “I don’t have to show you no stinkin’ badges,” the oft-quoted line from “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” Lee’s war film nearly succumbs to its own ambitions. A story running looping through relitigated emotional battles. However, the last fifteen minutes, which offers a “Good Will Hunting” level of catharsis, plays so relevantly and powerfully, it’s as if Lee filmed the concluding scenes during the last two weeks. While not perfect, nothing worthwhile ever is, “Da 5 Bloods” sees Lee exploring brotherhood, PTSD, greed, and how lost legacies and voices have led to present protests for a deceptively rousing war drama. [B]