Spike Lee's Prize Turkey

Rating: 3/10 (15 June 2020)

Say hello to Spike Lee's worst ever film .
It's not only his worst film by a long , long way, it's an absolute Turkey in my opinion.
I totally get the underlying sentiment of the film. How a disproportionate amount of young black men were sent to Vietnam to fight for a county that treated them so badly ( and still does) but make it a film about that and don't wrap it up in an awful film about retrieving gold and fighting the locals and each other .
I'm not exaggerating when I say that at least an hour could have been cut from the film . When they found Storming Norman , I would have been quite happy if it would have ended there . In fact i would have doubled my score if it had but no , we get an extra hour of complete nonsense.
All the major studios turned this film down and it was only Netflix that picked it up . You can see why .
It's an incredibly lazy film .
The flashbacks look great with the grainy 16mm film but why on earth didn't they use younger actors ? It looks ridiculous with four pensioners fighting alongside Chadwick Boseman . They couldn't even be bothered to get rid of the grey beards !
Another problem I have is the horrendous soundtrack that overpowers the dialogue . It's like the backing music that should be on an epic like Laurence Of Arabia or blockbuster like Indiana Jones . It feels so out of place .
If it's a social commentary on the black history of Vietnam you want then you get get a bit of that but for the most it's about a group of so called friends who do nothing but argue with each other for two and a half hours . It gave me a head ache .