Da 5 Bloods is exactly the type of ambitious, cluttered, anything but subtle movie you'd expect from Spike Lee

Rating: 7/10 (28 June 2020)

Much as I felt Once Upon a Time In Hollywood was pure, unadulterated Tarantino, Da 5 Bloods feels like pure Spike Lee (though granted I haven't seen nearly enough of Lee's films to say anything holistic). It's a tense, action-filled film that is filled with modern and historical commentary, not just in themes but by Spike using archival footage as well. The best and clearest point Lee makes in the film is the experience of black soldiers in Vietnam. As with all the other ideas in the film, they're explicitly thrown at you in dialogue, but there is so much to dig into in regards to the intersections of war, race, and the way history propagates forwards. I am fully on the Delroy Lindo train along with everyone else, as he is fantastic in every scene, and also love Jonathan Majors as his son. I really liked the way the historical flashbacks had a narrower aspect ratio and emphasized the way the men still feel like they're in the war mentally. At the same time, the events in the film did feel so ham-fisted and strange at times as to limit immersion. The character interactions are just non-stop fighting, and obviously the struggling vets with PTSD will have their moments, but this is also a team that cares so much about each other that the complete inability to work out situations reasonably was baffling to me. Lee hits us over the head with how greed influences their decisions, but we don't get enough of a sense of their modern lives to understand why they care so much about the gold. It didn't bother me as much when I watched it, but thinking about it now I do also see how the Vietnamese people were painted with very broad, stereotypical strokes and Lee doesn't combine his racism-related points with imperialist-related points. It's certainly entertaining and has lots of ideas, but all of those ideas were shoved at us with no nuance and the character development outside of Lindo's Paul was mediocre. Worth watching, and overall a good film, but not a memorable one.