Da Five Bloods is a typical Spike Lee "joint" as he calls his films -- it's a combination of didactic material, much of it archival footage, intercut with a rabble-rousing genre film. In this case, the movie combines plot elements from the Rambo pictures (the triumphant return of Americans to Vietnam) with elements of the heist movie. There are echoes of many previous films in Da Five Bloods, including overt allusions to Apocalypse Now and John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The movie is long (about two hours and 35 minutes) and extremely ambitious -- it founders, unfortunately, on an implausible script. Lee is caught between several genres -- elements of the film seem fantastic and, even, highly stylized: the plot is driven by wild coincidences and fairy tale elements (for instance, the crate of gleaming gold bullion). These genre elements clash with aspects of the movie that seem realistically conceived. And Lee's attempt to fit the violent adventure story into a framework of mini-lectures about the Black contribution to American history is startling, but not wholly effective. Lee seems embarrassed by the Rambo-style violence central to the story and wants to redeem the enterprise with "woke" political themes. But preaching and murderous violence staged for thrills don't really cohere. I assume the Lee believes most of the people who will watch this show need to be educated about African-American history -- the film i includes speeches by Malcolm X and Martin Luther King as well as references to notable figures in Black history (for instance Crispus Atticus). Lee's influenced by Brechtian theater and doesn't attempt to conceal the teaching moments in the picture -- he just inserts this material into the story in the most overt and ham-handed manner possible. You can admire his audacity but question whether there might not have been a better way to make the points without, in effect, lecturing the audience. (Consider, for instance, Huston's The Man Who Would Be King, a film that makes powerful ideological points about the theory and practice of imperialist colonialism without ever making direct address to the audience.) Lee's approach verges on insulting to the audience -- does he really think we're so dumb that we didn't know, as an example, that Black GI's formed a disproportionately large contingent of the combat forces in Vietnam? The very weaknesses of the film though are what makes it interesting. Lee isn't content with a violent heist movie and wants to make larger points about justice, history, and oppression. Similarly, Lee isn't content with preaching to his audience -- he wants to entertain and will throw in everything but the kitchen sink to engage his viewers: there are bloody shootouts, last minute heroics, a snake attack, as well as lots of very interesting quasi-documentary images of modern day Vietnam.
Everything about the film's production is first-class: the churning and, sometimes, soaring musical score by Terence Blanchard (jazz-inflected Aaron Copland) is wonderful, although as in many of Lee's best movies, the lush orchestral themes aren't correlated to what we see on screen and simply play on their own, providing a strange, disorienting flood of music under the images. The photography is brilliant -- the picture is filled with burnished images of jungle, the luminous skyscrapers of Ho Chi Minh city and the vast, eerie mountains like something from a Chinese scroll where much of the action takes place. (The cityscapes were shot in Ho Chi Minh City and the landscape scenes were filmed in Thailand). The acting is brilliant and, indeed, the central protagonist in the film, Paul, as a MAGA-hat wearing, Trump-supporting, PTSD -tormented Black King Lear, provides an Oscar-worthy performance. Raging against the Vietnamese, his buddies, and the racist establishment, Delroy Lindo, channels Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando, and Shaft as well -- viewers might be ashamed to admit it, but everyone has encountered a raging Black man, apparently high on something, storming down a city street, bare-chested and screaming in indignation at everyone he passes; Paul exemplifies this kind of rage and he's armed with an automatic weapon for half of the movie so he's genuinely scary yet also strangely pathetic. This is a tremendous piece of acting which compensates for the fact that the other "bloods' are underwritten -- we really don't get much sense for any of them other than the soft-spoken Otis, a sad old man who has left a beautiful prostitute whom he loved, pregnant with his daughter, in Vietnam. All the other figures in the movie are, more or less, either caricatures or ciphers -- Lee and his scriptwriters haven't bothered to develop much of a backstory for any of them and they really don't have much to say or do on-screen.
The picture roars off to a start with Muhammad Ali famously declaring that no "Vietnamese ever called me nigger." There's a montage of images characterizing the racial and political chaos in the sixties and Lee is careful to identify the pictures since he assumes (maybe correctly) that many members in his youthful audience won't know or understand the references -- for instance, he explains in a superimposed title the Kent State shootings and calls out the names of the victims in the text projected with the pictures. The film proper starts in Ho Chi Minh City where the Bloods meet in an expensive-looking hotel, have some drinks, and plot their hike through the jungle to retrieve Norman's bones and the gold. We see them in the infamous nightclub Apocalypse Now where there is a tense scene between Paul and some ex-Viet Cong veterans -- Paul is not about to forgive and forget the enmity in the conflict. Paul's estranged son, David, turns up, much to the chagrin of his father. (David wears a Morehouse College tee-shirt through most of the film and exemplifies a younger generation of Black men who have grown up skittish about race, but less enraged and angry than their fathers, something that Paul chooses to see as weakness.) David is too young to party with the older men and so he goes off to a saloon with a younger crowd where he meets the members of the aptly named LAMB, an international organization working in the hinterlands to clear landmines left over from the conflicts in the country -- these kids are White: a French girl who flirts with David, a fat American kid, and a cynical, even nihilistic Finn. They talk about the landmines littering the landscape and, of course, this is an ominous conversation as far as future plot developments will be concerned. There's a long sequence, some of it scored to Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" (in homage to the film Apocalypse Now) in which our heroes tour the canals of former Saigon city on a pontoon boat -- this is the best episode in the picture, shot documentary style and ending when Paul again seems triggered by encounters with the Vietnamese, slips into some kind of rage, and nearly causes a riot. By this time, the Bloods have acquired a Vietnamese guide and fixer (his father fought with the Americans) and the kindly Otis has gone to see his former girlfriend and met his half-Black half-Asian daughter. Otis' girlfriend introduces the Bloods to a sinister figure, an old Frenchman played by Jean Reno. Reno's character promises the help our heroes get the gold bullion out of the country, albeit for a significant cut. One look at Reno's decaying features, filmed in a big profile close-up, should have warned the Bloods not to trust this guy -- he is shot like Caligula crossed with Edward G. Robinson's Little Caesar -- obviously not a White man with whom you should do business. But, of course, our heroes, like most treasure-hunters, are more than a little dim-witted and blinded by greed, make a deal with Reno's smuggler. The bloods with David in tow then ride be jeep into the boondocks and set off on a long cross-country hike -- this is where the implausibilities in Lee's slipshod and carelessly designed script start piling up. These men are well into their seventies and they don't seem fit enough to walk ten blocks, let along many miles in the stifling mountainous rain-forest. And, if they find the bullion, the viewer wonders: how in the world are they going to carry it out of the jungle? Trekking through the rain forest things begin to go bad. Otis has been given a gun by his former girlfriend but, of course, it ends up in the hands of the paranoid Paul, now acting a bit like a combination of Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny and Ahab in Moby Dick. The bloods find both the gold and Norman's bones, but by this time they have wandered into a deadly minefield. When the LAMB kids happen to show up, things go from bad to worse -- Paul beats them up (he thinks they are after his gold) and, then, ties them together with a rope. Meantime the hapless expedition has been shadowed by sinister Vietnamese armed with machine guns. There are several impressive fire-fights and lots of people get killed. To provide further details might spoil the picture for some people and, so, I will simply say that the film is very violent, although there's an ending coded as happy -- although, it's more poignant, tragic and bitter-sweet. Lee, then, does what no White film maker could get away with -- he ends the picture with Martin Luther King speaking about the promise of America. This quotation doesn't really fit anything that we've seen, but it's intended to provide a moment of hopeful uplift to what has been a fairly grim last hour. Throughout, the film, Lee shows us flashback images of combat in Vietnam that look something like the chaotic battle sequences in The Deer Hunter -- in these scenes, Lee doesn't "de-age" his protagonists: the bloods interact with the preternaturally young and strong Norman as they appear in their seventies. Lee's point is that these men have never grown beyond some of the savagery, fear and horror that they experienced in Vietnam -- they relive these scenes in a perpetual present. This is a tricky conceit but it pays off brilliantly and makes a powerful point about memory and trauma. Each one of us is still a child trembling before an angry father or a youth terrified on the battlefield or a hapless young lover -- you progress beyond these experiences but you don't really grow out of (or overcome) them.
The problems with the film are grounded in opportunism and plausibility. Again, I am skeptical that a White director could get away with justifying the bloods blithe intent to steal millions of dollars from the United States government in the name of reparations. Norman justifies the theft of the money, meant for U. S. allies, as "reparations" for slavery -- but I don't think the notion of "reparations" was really a matter of discussion in 1971 when the film is set. Furthermore, Norman is presented as the pure, noble warrior -- stealing this money, which merely impoverishes another oppressed group, the Hmong and Laotian irregulars, seems to cut against everything that we are supposed to believe about this character and, so, diminishes the film and threatens to make it incoherent. Reno's character is intended to keep the picture politically pristine -- Lee is unable to show Vietnamese criminals (this would undercut the themes of the film -- particularly the message of the unjust and immoral war) and so he needs a White ex-colonial fall-guy to blame for the carnage in the film's second half. There are ludicrously stupid things in the movie, including a scene in which a rope is used to yank one of the protagonists off a landmine onto which he has stepped -- the sequence makes no sense and is risible, although no one will laugh because we've just seen in graphic imagery what one of these mines can do.. The entire climax filmed, in part, among the landmines is opportunistic in the sense that the bombs can be used to cull the cast and eliminate characters whose survival might be problematic in terms of the plot. I remain a disbeliever in the notion that these old men could haul a thousand pounds of gold out of the wilderness on their backs. The deep structure of the plot is actually Robert Stone's novel Dog Soldiers and the film version with Nick Nolte directed by Karel Reisz and called Who Will Stop the Raiin? The final scenes in which Paul staggers through the deadly jungle ranting to the camera recall similar scenes (with less ranting) in which the wounded Nick Nolte hikes to his death on desert railroad deep in Mexico while a fire-fight is underway "back at the ranch" as they say. (This sequence from Stone's novel in turn references the death of Neal Cassady, also in Mexico and Humphrey Bogart's solitary demise in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.) Lee makes amusing use of a pro-Trump red MAGA hat that acquires considerable symbolic importance as the film progresses. The film is simply too complex, ambitious, and poorly written, at least, in part to be wholly successful -- you have the sense that the movie would be better if it were a tightly focused heist drama (about ninety minutes long) or a full-blown epic three to four hours in length.
Notwithstanding these cavils, which are not inconsiderable, the film is worth seeing and viewers will have to make up their own minds about whether Lee has succeeded in his twin goals -- that is, educating viewers about 'systemic' racism and creating an elaborate and gripping adventure film. I'm skeptical but there are many, many things to admire in this film and everyone should see it.
(Most films end with a certification that no animals were harmed in the filming -- this is notably absent at the end of this picture. If you have an affection for snakes, the film will be disturbing to you. I will warrant that, at least, two snakes were harmed in the production of this movie.)
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