Released in the midst of the largest civil unrest in America since the protests of 1968, Da 5 Bloods benefits from wrenchingly serendipitous timing. The film opens with the sort of summation montage that often serves as the climax of Spike Lee’s joints: footage of Operation Ranch Hand spraying campaigns; Muhammed Ali decrying the Vietnam War in 1978, saying that the Viet Cong were less racist than his own country; Angela Davis ruing the possibility of the U.S. devolving into fascism; the protests at Kent and Jackson State; the fall of Saigon; and Apollo 11’s launch that’s counterpointed with a protest sign proclaiming the child hunger that could be addressed with the money a government spends on space travel. Compressing these events together in such a dense, head-spinning fashion suggests that the U.S. is an imperialist regime with a highly selective grasp of freedom. The country is also understood here to feed various machines—the war, the police state—at the expense of its own people as well as people across the world. As in Chi-Raq, Lee is saying to us: “Wake up!”
Like many a Spike Lee joint before it, Da 5 Bloods is a blend of genre film and political essay. The narrative proper opens in present-day Ho Chi Minh City, where four African-American Vietnam veterans, each one a distinct personality type, are assembling in a hotel lobby: the hothead, Paul (Delroy Lindo); the calm intellectual, Otis (Clarke Peters); the guy made good, Eddie (Norm Lewis); and the hail-fellow-well-met Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.). Lee enjoys regarding these characters with their Hawaiian shirts, beer bellies, and commandingly weathered faces as they drink tropical drinks and slap one another’s backs and settle into old rhythms, fashioning an atmospheric casualness that he eventually squanders.
Early portions of Da 5 Bloods exude the lurid, confrontational electricity that has often been so exhilarating in Lee’s work. Regarding a Ho Chi Minh City that, with its active nightlife and proliferation of fast food establishments, might be mistaken for a contemporary American city, Eddie says that “they didn’t need us, they should’ve just sent Mickey D’s, Pizza Hut, and the Colonel and we would’ve defeated the VC in one week.” The sly implication is that, one way or another, America got its hands on Vietnam. Minutes later, the Rambo and Missing in Action movies are familiarly criticized for offering a white-man savior fantasy of “winning” the war, while Otis reminds us of a true hero, African-American soldier Milton Olive III, who jumped on a grenade for his platoon, a picture of whom Lee briefly and movingly cuts to.
These pop-cultural references make us privy to how war is committed and then sold back to us as an often exclusionary fantasy—a double dip of atrocity. Yet Lee also indulges in his penchant for sensualist debauchery, which is tinged with moral and political irony. The main characters may voice many of Lee’s talking points, but they also enjoy getting loaded and dancing to their old-school songs in a country they once invaded—a potential hypocrisy that’s hauntingly acknowledged when North Vietnamese veterans buy them a drink in a gesture that’s smirking and pitying. The Vietnamese characters in this film casually view the Americans as unwitting instruments of something vast, ludicrous, and monstrous—and this quality, along with the Lee’s rapturous foregrounding of black characters in a war genre dominated by white men, makes Da 5 Bloods well worth contending with.
As the film progresses, though, it’s hard to distinguish irony from fealty to formula. In Chi-Raq and BlackKklansman, the pulp and political elements were intrinsically wedded, feeding one another, while Da 5 Bloods settles into an anecdotal “either/or” structure in which important historical facts alternate with clichés. The four men have returned to Vietnam to recover the remains of their platoon leader, Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman), seemingly (and bafflingly) named after Gulf War general Norman Schwarzkopf. But they’ve also returned to find the millions of dollars in gold they buried decades ago after a gun battle with the Viet Cong. In flashbacks, Stormin’ Norman says that this money, which was being flown into South Vietnam as support from the U.S., can be used as reparations for black people.
This is a lot of plot, and Lee laboriously sets it in motion. Supporting characters are introduced, with increasing tediousness, to suggest various elements of the Vietnam War. Representing the French occupation of the country is Desroche (Jean Reno), a shady dealer who agrees to help the four veterans get the gold out of the country via the establishment of off-shore accounts. Acknowledging the fraternization of American G.I.s with Vietnamese prostitutes, as well as the lingering racism faced by black soldiers, is Tiên Luu (Y. Lan), a woman from Otis’s past who connects the men with Desroche, and who tells Otis that she was ostracized for having the child (Sandy Huong Pham) of a black man. Paul’s adult son, David (Jonathan Majors), tags along so that we may see the effects of one generation’s PTSD on its offspring, and Hedy (Mélanie Thierry) personifies French guilt over colonialism while making googly eyes at Paul in scenes that are among the most banal of Lee’s career.
The signposting dialogue is amusingly blunt at first, but as the main characters continue to trade repetitive thematic dialogue, you sense Lee’s struggle to tie his various contradictory ambitions together. Lee wishes to decry the simplistic heroism of most war films while fashioning one of his own that trades in similar fantasies. In flashbacks, Terence Blanchard’s score soars on the soundtrack as the men gloriously battle the Viet Cong, destroying an enemy that’s every bit as faceless as it is in more routine genre movies. (In a wonderful touch, the young bloods are played in these scenes by the same actors as they are in the contemporary timeline, evoking the way we tend to insert our present-day selves into our memories.) And Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now is visually quoted at least twice, for murky reasons. For a film that decries cinema’s valorization of white men in the Vietnam War, it seems odd to callback to a movie that inadvertently does the same thing in its “Ride of the Valkyries” sequence. (These references suggest a satirical intention that doesn’t quite scan.)
Whatever its faults, Da 5 Bloods is a more visceral and unmooring experience than Lee’s last war film, Miracle at St. Anna. There’s a superbly timed set piece involving a land mine late in the film, and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel gives the Vietnam jungles a feverish intensity, with shifting stocks and aspect ratios communicating various timelines and perspectives. But the film is also prone to sanctimony, especially evident in the Christ-like Stormin’ Norman, who’s lit in heavenly hues and called “Martin and Malcom” by his fellow bloods, though he truly suggests Willem Dafoe’s character in Platoon with less personality. Boseman has a hauntingly gaunt presence, but he’s already played too many saints.
Lost in all this bombast is the kind of story about these men’s lives that could’ve affirmed Lee’s critique of America. Paul, who eventually becomes this film’s Fred C. Dobbs, is a Donald Trump supporter who wears a MAGA hat and resents immigrants because of the mistreatment of his own people. The implication here is: Why should we empathize with them after all that we’ve suffered? This is a provocative idea for a character, and it potentially conjoins Lee’s interests in the parallels between past and present systemic racism in American society. It would’ve been interesting to hear what the other men, who hate Trump, would have to say about this, and to see these tensions inform their struggle to steal the gold. But Lee reduces this idea to a few jokes; it’s just another conceit that he throws at the audience. At its best, Da 5 Bloods offers a damning, impassioned, hallucinatory collage of images and ideas concerning the relationship between racism and warfare. At its worst, it’s a vibrant mess.
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