Aug 15, 2020
Review: Da 5 Bloods
“We fought in an immoral war that wasn’t ours, for rights we didn’t have.” — Paul
Spike Lee’s latest film is a buddy action movie about five Vietnam veterans on a search to extract their friend’s remains and a chest of gold from the jungle. It follows a long line of buddy war movies and covers a lot of the bases you might expect from a film about the Vietnam War directed by Spike Lee.
Themes of social and racial justice set Da 5 Bloods (only available on Netflix right now) apart from movies like Three Kings, but Lee’s Vietnam Epic is not going to go down as one of the best in the genre.
The Deer Hunter, Platoon, and Apocalypse Now are admittedly fierce competition — and maybe Da 5 Bloods shouldn’t even be compared with them — but Lee’s take on the war is less textured and more oblique. His five main characters are pretty indistinguishable — except Paul, who is an emotionally troubled Trump supporter — and the Vietnamese characters are equally so. Ever since I read The Sympathizer, it’s tough for me to watch a Vietnam War movie without critiquing the lack of depth in Vietnamese characters.
The sprawling, two and a half-hour long epic take a long time to get going, but once it does, it splurges with a Tarantino-esque level of graphic violence. In the end, Lee puts a bow on it by hammering home his two main points:
- Black soldiers were taken advantage of just as black people have been throughout American history.
- The capitalistic first-world is still sucking developing countries dry just like they have since colonial times.
It’s a fine message, but Lee’s delivery isn’t his most potent.
Highlights
I like the way Lee injects history into his movies. He’s on a personal mission to ensure that movie-goers are educated about black achievement, so he never lets an opportunity to raise the profile of a formerly obscure figure from black history.
Lee also introduces the continuing horror of land mines in Da 5 Bloods. These things are still killing and maiming people around the world, but we do very little to mitigate it because it’s not in our backyard.
The production quality was great. This is Lee’s highest budget movie, and it shows. I also enjoyed the fact that Lee didn’t age back his characters for the flashbacks, instead using the aspect ratio to indicate time.
Lowlights
You can probably tell this was not my favorite Spike Lee film. It’s a buddy action movie with a soul, which is naturally a genre that risks feeling cheesy. The slow start, flat characters, and predictable plot were the biggest offenses.
Lee can make a great epic — Malcolm X is one of the best in its class — but this isn’t one of them.
Overall
⭐️ ⭐️
As a Spike Lee fan, it’s hard for me to admit this, but I didn’t like Da 5 Bloods. If you’re an action movie fan and you can get through the repetitive, slow first half, you might get a kick out of the gunfighting in the second, but it’s not going to blow you away.
