Da 5 Bloods

Spike Lee follows up his Oscar-winning BlacKkKlansman with perhaps his most ambitious picture since Malcolm X.  Da 5 Bloods tells the story of four black Vietnam vets who dubbed themselves "Bloods" back when they served in the US Army’s 1st Infantry Division under the charismatic squad leader "Stormin'" Norman Holloway. Norman was killed during a firefight the other men escaped before the entire area was buried by a napalm strike. Now, after the Bloods learn that a landslide has uncovered a crashed plane near where Normal was killed, they returned to Vietnam to exhume their leader's body.

We quickly learn the Bloods are there to retrieve more than their fallen comrade. Before the Vietnamese attack that killed Norman, the five soldiers had discovered, inside the crashed US plane, a strongbox full of gold bars—payment to the locals for their help in fighting the Viet Cong. The Bloods, resentful of both the Vietnamese and their own racist country that sent them to fight in a morally dubious imperialist war waged against people of color, had decided to take the gold for themselves before the firefight thwarted that plan. Now, decades later, the ageing men, all suffering from varying degrees of PTSD, have reunited to hump back into the jungle, collect the loot, and—with the help of a Vietnamese former girlfriend and a shady French businessman, smuggle the gold out of the country.

While the film confronts myriad issues, the primary theme and narrative about the irrevocable cost to a man’s soul when he embarks on a quest for buried gold is a clever spin on John Huston’s iconic 1948 film of B. Traven’s adventure novel, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. In place of Humphrey Bogart’s Fred C. Dobbs, Lee gives us Delroy Lindo’s Paul—the most traumatized of Da 5 Bloods, haunted by what he did and saw in Vietnam, and angry about his lot in life. Paul is a Trump voter who complains about illegal immigrants and sports a MAGA hat, much to the chagrin of his fellow African-Americans who did not skirt the draft like Trump by pretending to have bone spurs. The men are soon surprised to learn that Paul’s son, David, is joining them on their mission. Paul has always had a tempestuous relationship with his only child, and the others aren’t thrilled about having to cut him in on the score.

Their journey upriver from Ho Chi Minh City into the Vietnamese jungle recalls Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, one of many American movies about the Vietnam conflict that the characters and the film comment on. As in most of his “joints,” Lee has as much to say about the way American movies have shaped American history as he does about American history itself. Working from an original script written by Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo titled The Last Tour, which Oliver Stone was once attached to direct, Lee and his frequent collaborator Kevin Willmott (BlacKkKlansman, Chi-Raq) use the premise as a springboard to explore a host of longstanding concerns about Black lives in America, not just the Black experience in the Vietnam war.

It’s just too bad Lee no longer seems to believe (if he ever believed it) that a story can convey complex themes on its own without a running commentary from its director. The director constantly stops the movie to turn it into the live-tweet equivalent of a college lecture—both via his characters speaking directly and indirectly to the audience, or interrupting the engrossing narrative to show us a PowerPoint presentation of still photos and archival footage that underscores his points (these images and text fly by so fast it’s difficult to imagine that they end up meaning much to viewers who aren’t already well acquainted with the history.) Rather than digging deep into the issues his film confronts, Lee seems content to simply point at them once he’s brought them to the surface. A riveting film might have come from exploring the internal lives his characters, the way he does in his best pictures, but only one of Da 5 Bloods, Paul, is presented as a complex individual. The rest of the roles are woefully underwritten, especially the women and Vietnamese characters who are as two-dimensional as you’d find in any typical Hollywood depiction of white men returning to “re-fight” this war.

Still, Lee is able to make many points without underlining them; such as the way Paul’s MAGA hat is eventually donned by a host of the film’s characters, and by recreating the broadcasts of the North Vietnamese propagandist Hanoi Hannah. Just seeing the infamous radio DJ speaking into her mic and watching how her words resonate on the faces of Da 5 Bloods at various stages of the story would have been all this film needed to drive home its message. But far too often, Lee can’t help inserting didactic dialogue that’s impossible for any of his actors except Lindo to deliver with any credibility. 

Da 5 Bloods is a prime example of a film that suffers from its lack of an A-list cast. Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Norm Lewis, and Jonathan Majors (as the three supporting Bloods and the young David) are all fine actors but they are not in the same league as Lindo or Chadwick Boseman (who plays "Stormin'" Norman in flashbacks). Lee apparently tried to set the film up initially with Denzel Washington, John David Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, and Giancarlo Esposito, but it couldn’t come together. Casting his lead roles with lesser know but well-liked characters actors lends the film a bit of an everyman quality, but this is a major movie and it would have worked far better with the star power that can only come from casting major movie stars. Along those lines, were Lee to have worked with a major producer, he might have reigned in some of his most indulgent auteurist tendencies—the way working with Brian Grazer on the great Inside Man (2006) seemed to focus Lee without at all hindering him artistically.

One of the best choices Lee makes (perhaps dictated by budget though I’m inclined to think he would have done this regardless of how much money Netflix ponied up) is his decision not to stage the flashback scenes with younger actors playing Da Bloods, or using Irishman style digital de-ageing techniques to make his actors look like younger versions of themselves. When the old men think back to their formative experiences in Vietnam, we see them (and they see themselves) as they are now, while their one comrade who didn’t survive the war is still as young and vital as he was back then. Lee shifts the film’s aspect ratio for each section of the film, but his simple choice of having these actors in their late-sixties play the twenty-year-old versions of themselves is the films’ most profoundly effective stylistic aspect. Never have cinematic flashbacks felt less like exposition and more like actual human memories—as if we’re experiencing what characters we’ve gotten to know are actually recalling, not looking at what a director or screenwriter needs us to understand. 

The uncanny quality of seeing these older Black actors in scenes with the young, vital, and very-much-alive Boseman also resonates with extratextual dimension. Lee and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel shoot Boseman (who became famous playing historical and fictional African-American icons like Jackie Robinson, James Brown, Thurgood Marshall, and T'Challa The Black Panther) like a golden, invincible ideal of manhood, with a look on his face that indicates deep wisdom beyond his years. The fact that Boseman was dying of cancer during the shoot, and would not live long beyond the film’s release, adds a layer of unplanned subtext to the picture far more powerful than any awkward monologue Lee could ask his other actors to deliver into the camera. The way Boseman’s character hangs over the picture encourages the older characters to live up to the ideals and wisdom he possessed. The way the late actor’s presence graces and haunts the picture does much the same.