Da 5 Bloods

[StevePulaski]

Da 5 Bloods (2020)
Directed by: Spike Lee

Rating: ★★★

Some films are released at the completely wrong point in history. Exhibit A could be how Eli Roth's violent vigilante picture Death Wish was initially set to come out in lieu of the mass shooting in Las Vegas in October 2017, only to be delayed to March of the next year, a couple weeks after the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. Then there are films like Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods, a rousing lightning bolt of a production that finds itself released in the middle of one of the greatest periods of civil unrest in America since the civil rights movement. Damn this ongoing pandemic, for this would've been a spectacular treat to see on the biggest screen in town.

Da 5 Bloods centers around four Vietnam war vets: the aggressive, unpredictable Paul (Delroy Lindo), jovial Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), serious and successful Eddie (Norm Lewis), and the calm and collected Otis (Clarke Peters), who head back to the country in present day in search of their buried treasure. Long ago, the men, along with their late leader "Stormin' Norman" (Chadwick Boseman), came in contact with a trunk of gold bars they discovered and promptly hid during one of their tours. The men think of the gold and its immense worth as "reparations," justifiably so; reparations from a country where 32% of its soldiers sent to Vietnam were black and received little else but a hard time upon returning home. It's harrowing to conceptualize the fact that while some blacks were fighting a miscalculated war, others were fighting for their own civil liberties on the homefront.

Accompanying the four men on their journey back to the jungle is David (Jonathan Majors), Paul's estranged son. Along the way, Otis reconnects with Tien (Le Y Lan), a former prostitute with whom he enjoyed many a night, get help from their tour guide, Vinh (Johnny Tri Nguyen), who, take note, refers to the past conflict as "The American War," and Hedy (Mélanie Thierry), a French woman with modern day ideals who traverses the woods of Vietnam for active landmines.

Lee cuts back and forth from the present day to the men's tour of duty in the 1970s, which notably has the elder actors playing themselves, adding a new "controversy" into the mix after everyone ostensibly forgot about the de-aging process used to turn Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci into boyhood versions of themselves in last year's The Irishman. The scenes are so reliant on action and swift camera movements that the presence of these older men doesn't take too much out of the experience. More notable, however, is the change in presentation. The scenes set in the 1970s is presented in 1.33:1 aspect ratio, resembling a tight letterboxed format, while the present day material is presented in the vastly more common 2.35:1 ratio.

On the surface, the film appears to resemble Apocalypse Now, especially through some of the flashbacks that plunge us into wartime action that resembles the kind of news reel footage Americans were presented on the news during the 1960s and 1970s. But Lee's film actually has more in common with the Humphrey Bogart drama The Treasure of Sierra Madre, written by John Huston in 1948 and based on the novel by B. Traven. That was another heist film that depicted Bogart's slow descent into madness, which is what happens with Lindo's Paul, who is shaken to the core by PTSD. Paul confirms to his friends early that he's all in favor of President Donald Trump's long-running plea to "build a wall" between Mexico and the United States. Paul himself is so disenfranchised that he comes to villainize others while sick of expecting any kind of retribution from the institutions that have left him behind, including, but not limited to, the U.S. government and the VA hospital.

Some will say the film too takes from The Treasure of Sierra Madre the idea that money is the root of all evil, that tried and true saying we've come to ponder about as deeply as most of the idioms we incorrectly use on a daily basis. But the fact of the matter, at least in my opinion, that money doesn't necessarily change you. Not radically at least. Money just makes you more of who you inherently are, for it gives you a means and status foreign to most individuals. If you're a hospitable person by nature, chances are if you come into money, you'll retain that level of generosity in times of duress, or to help a friend in need. If you're stingy, you'll stash it away for an emergency or tragedy that'll likely never come. If you're reckless, however, which is what Paul is, the very thought of being within inches of untold riches will consume you and drive you to make rash decisions, which we see unfold throughout most of the second and third acts of the film.

If there's a downside, Da 5 Bloods isn't as tight as BlacKkKlansman, the film that apparently reminded the masses Spike Lee is not only still around but continues to make some of the best American dramas. Typical of many Netflix projects from A-list directors, Da 5 Bloods is overlong and brimful of ideas it can't adequately contextualize. The cutaways profiling black track and field athlete Edwin Moses and Malcolm X speeches are not the problem. In the hands of a lesser director, they would be, but anyone familiar with Lee's more contemporary body of work will tell you that you're in for something of a welcomed history lesson with each new project. The fault here is the number of asides that don't feel humanized, most glaringly the relationship between Otis and his former lover. The near complete creative control Lee was likely offered permitted him to jam a number of storylines and thematic ideas into the picture, and overall, Da 5 Bloods comes dangerously close to crumbling under the weight of its own ambition at times.

I was most entranced by Da 5 Bloods when it focused on the camaraderie between the titular pack. This is an immensely fun group of character actors who don't get enough time to vent and be themselves in the company of each other. We do get a great deal of that, coupled with some gorgeous cinematography by the acclaimed Newton Thomas Sigel, but had it not been for the racial tensions and urgency of the current climate, I'm not sure this picture would be as critically renowned as it's been. It's got some serious pacing issues along with clumsy political tangents, two things BlacKkKlansman handled so seamlessly.

Yet amidst one of the rockiest, most stressful years in recent memory, I'd be damned if I were to discount the large-scale storytelling and ambition as a crippling detriment to a film released on an accessible platform with an important message at hand. Delroy Lindo, with his fierce and occasionally frightening performance is coming for that Oscar come 2021 to boot. Like most Spike Lee movies, Da 5 Bloods is undoubtedly worth seeing and, more importantly, worth thinking about and discussing.

NOTE: Da 5 Bloods is now available to watch on Netflix.

NOTE II: Check out my review of Da 5 Bloods on my web-show Sleepless with Steve. Catch the show Wednesday evenings at 8pm CST at twitch.tv/sleeplesswithsteve!

Starring: Delroy Lindo, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Jonathan Majors, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, Mélanie Thierry, Chadwick Boseman, Jean Reno, Johnny Tri Nguyen, Paul Walter Hauser, and Le Y Lan. Directed by: Spike Lee.