Starring Delroy Lindo, Jonathan Majors, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, Isiah Whitlock Jr. Directed by Spike Lee
With every new Spike Lee film, there is always the use in the media somewhere of the phrase “timely”. There will never be a time when Lee’s films aren’t timely, as sadly the state of the US, and the world at large, means that works like Do The Right Thing or BlacKkKlansman remain prescient.
With his new joint, Lee takes a look at the culture surrounding the Vietnam war and Black men’s roles in it. The story follows four men Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis) and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr) as well as Paul’s son David (Jonathan Majors) who return to Vietnam to recover the body of their fallen commander Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman), and some buried gold.
The film shows Lee at his most Lee, mixing archive footage of the past (complete with some potshots at Trump) as well as a story of the unsung Black men who went into a war that was not their fight. The film has all the hallmarks of Lee: his penchant for jukebox soundtracks, and explorations of what Black men do and think.
As the film starts it feels like a Las Vegas-style “get the gang back together” story, showing these four men in Vietnam, drinking, discussing their differences, in one sequence dancing in a club that feels very much in that vein, but as the aspect ratio changes so does the tone. The story is very much inspired by Apocalypse Now, the idea of travelling upriver on a boat and discovering something about yourself as you seek to find a military hero.
What works best here, is that Lee chooses to fill the entire screen when it becomes the story of the men in the wild, and changes the ratio when the flashbacks occur, so that it feels like the sort of John Wayne movie your dad watches on TCM on a Sunday afternoon, a men’n’movies style action film when he VC are bad, and the Americans are good. There are allusions to other films constantly, not least in the use of Veronica Ngo as Hanoi Hannah, which heavily reflect the radio sections from The Warriors.
The expanding and contracting aspect ratio is underlined by superb work by cinematographer Newton Thomas Siegel, who manages to evoke different genres to illicit to the correct tone of the film for each section. It’s also helped by the evocative score by Terrence Blanchard, sombre and serious in the present day, while triumphant like a propaganda piece during the Vietnam flashbacks.
The decision to use Marvin Gaye as a sort of narrator also works; using ‘Trouble Man’ to underline the opening section helps explain the mood of the times of Vietnam, and the use of footage of Black icons like Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King.
The choice not to use The Irishman style de-aging effects, or cast younger actors for the intimate Vietnam flashbacks helps too, and is never intrusive, you get the idea that these men are living through Vietnam constantly, their thoughts always going there.
It being a Spike Lee joint it’s also incredibly political, not just critiquing the war, but the current climate, despite being an ensemble piece the film pretty much belongs to Delroy Lindo. His turn as PTSD stricken Paul is underlined by his casual racism towards the Vietnamese as well as his support of Trump – he pointedly wears a MAGA hat and is unapologetic about it. The comments are clear that the lost and dispossessed of the US gravitate towards someone who sells them the lies they want to hear.
Lindo has always been reliable, and the fact that he along with his cohorts would be considered “character actors” means that it feels like each could be the standout. But Lindo, in his delivery of lines “I see ghosts” or his raging down the barrel of the camera sets him apart as the stand out lead of the film.
The film is about two and a half hours, but never feels that way, despite the plot being fairly simple it works because you invest in the characters, in fact it feels at times like you want the more shorty action bits to go away so you can see these five men just talk.
The film also, unfortunately, suffers due to its introduction of Jean Reno, Melanie Thierry and Paul Walter Hauser. Reno feels like a cut-and-paste bad sneaky French guy, while Thierry suffers from a recurring issue of Lee’s in that the directory seems to not really know what to do with female characters, so she just sort of has no purpose here.
By the film’s end however, it is the central five (or six) that keep you rooted. It’s smart to cast Boseman as a noble war hero since he will forever be well-recognised as Black Panther, and is probably just one biopic away from cementing his place as one of the iconic Black men of cinema.
What Da 5 Bloods is, is a (shudder) timely look at what happens to war veterans, and the dispossessed, but done by a master filmmaker working for a studio – in this case Netflix – that has faith in his ability. Come awards season, it will be interesting to see if this film hits the nominations; after all, Lee has always been a director of varying work. But here it feels as urgent, while being as enjoyable as many of his other works. It’s perhaps not as funny as BlacKkKlansman, nor as incendiary as Do the Right Thing, but it has the same level of “this is how I feel” earnestness that Malcolm X held, while sitting alongside something like 4 Little Girls and Crooklyn as something that could find an audience that will hold it in high regard.
With Lee on this form, whatever he turns to next – it feels like it may well be about how people of colour suffered the most at the hands of Covid-19 – could be his most off-the-rails film yet. Whatever it is, we cannot wait for the next toke of a ‘Spike Lee joint’.
