Movie Review: Da 5 Bloods

Da 5 Bloods (2020) **** ½ / *****
Directed by: Spike Lee.
Written by: Danny Bilson & Paul De Meo and Kevin Willmott & Spike Lee.
Starring: Delroy Lindo (Paul), Jonathan Majors (David), Clarke Peters (Otis), Norm Lewis (Eddie), Isiah Whitlock Jr. (Melvin), Mélanie Thierry (Hedy), Paul Walter Hauser (Simon), Jasper Pääkkönen (Seppo), Johnny Nguyen (Vinh Tran), Lê Y. Lan (Tiên Luu), Lam Nguyen (Quân), Sandy Huong Pham (Michon), Jean Reno (Desroche), Chadwick Boseman (Stormin' Norman), Van Veronica Ngo (Hanoi Hannah), Anh Tuan Nguyen (Chavy), Duc Luong (Bao), Quoc Tuan (Tam).

The re-emergence of Spike Lee as a filmmaker who inspires such fierce debate – debate that goes outside of the typical film press – has been welcome over the past few years, even as I feel the need the point out that Lee never really went anywhere, and his films were always worthy of those debates whether or not they happened. We didn’t get the kind of cultural debates about Lee’s films like Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, Red Hook Summer, Chi-Raq, Pass Over and others deserved – but perhaps those conversations are just lying dormant for now – it took years for people to catch on to the fact that his Bamboozled (2000) was one of his masterpieces, deserving of the kind of introspection that films like Do the Right Thing or Malcolm X always inspired. Yes, Lee’s films are messy – and that leads to a somewhat inconsistent filmography – and often to inconsistent films. But few filmmakers ever are as worthy as a deep dive as Lee is.

His latest film, Da 5 Bloods, is, like his last film, BlackKklansman, one of his best. It’s a film about four black Vietnam vets, returning to the country they fought in 50 years ago on a dual mission. The first is they want to recover the body of their leader – Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman) who died there in 1971, and the second is to get their hands on a giant cache of gold bars they hid there all those years ago – both of which they thought was lost. It’s better not to think about the ages of the four men played by Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Norm Lewis – which would be at minimum 70 (an age none of them have reached yet – and Lewis isn’t even 60), kind of like you just had to except that Christopher Plummer’s character in Inside Man was probably a couple decades too young. You go with it though – just like you go with the fact that when Lee does flashback to Vietnam, he simply keeps the same four actors playing the same roles, and doesn’t even bother with The Irishman style de-aging. It’s not really the point.

Da 5 Bloods is many things all at once. Lee has never been one to hide his influences – and something like Apocalypse Now gets a massive shout-out that is undeniable. But he’s really making a riff on John Huston’s masterful The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) – about a trip of prospectors, one of whom, played by Humphrey Bogart in one of his greatest performances, goes mad from paranoia and greed (in the wake of Da 5 Bloods, I revisited Huston’s masterpiece – and it’s as powerful as ever). It is also a film about the hidden trauma of black veterans like these men – a story that is too often not told, even in America, which loves nothing more than valorizing the men who fought for their country. Lee tried something similar, with far lesser results, with Miracle at St. Anna – about black WWII soldiers. Here though, he’s perfected it.

The best performance in the movie is by Delroy Lindo as Paul – who is essentially taking on the Bogart role from Sierra Madre. He’s a man whose time in Vietnam has warped and shaped his entire life. His son David (Jonathan Majors) comes along for the ride, and it’s safe to say that their relationship has never been anything close to good. Lindo has become a Trump supporter – he sports a MAGA hat, and the other four mock him a little for supporting “President Bone Spurs”, and say they thought they saw him at one of the Trump rallies playing Step N’ Fetch in the front row. But while Lee uses this to take some cheap (if accurate) shots at Trump – he, and Lindo, certainly don’t make Paul into a one-dimensional villain or idiot. Lindo has always been one of our great character actors – he’s been great in Lee films like Malcolm X, Crooklyn and especially Clockers – and he makes the most out his first collaboration with Lee in 25 years – and one of the few leads of his career. The whole performance is brilliant – paranoia, violent, pained, intense – and he takes it up another notch as the film heads down the homestretch. He doesn’t get Lee’s patented Dolly shot – but he does get another Lee staple, probably most memorably used before now by Edward Norton in 25^th Hour – and it results in the best acting you’re likely to see this year. Perhaps sensing that they cannot outdo Lindo in terms of intensity the two other most prominent performances – by Peters and Majors – go for more subtly. Peters is in particularly great as Otis – his time in Vietnam marked him as much as anyone – but he has become more inward, and introspective. It’s a fascinating performance by Peters – last seen in a Lee film as the preacher with a dark secret in Red Hook Summer. And the performance confirms the massive talent of Majors – who was excellent in last year’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco.

As with many Lee films, Da 5 Bloods does shoot off in all sorts of directions over its two-and-a-half-hour runtime. Like often with Lee, you could say that a shorter, tighter film may have been a better film – and yet, it also would have been less of a Spike Lee film. To me, the digressions in Lee’s films are part of what makes them so special. Here, he has made an entertaining genre, that also lashes out in pain and anger, then connects Vietnam to today, that can begin with Muhammed Ali, end with Martin Luther King Jr., and include so much else. It is classic Spike Lee.