Tribal Tedium

Rating: 4/10 (30 June 2020)

Spike Lee's second war film ( Miracle of St. Anna, 2008) is one messy message picture featuring Lee's sloppy attempts at coherence. A brother bonding film of rage and self pity with more than its share of insipid dialogue, Lee attempts to inject history into the story with his occasional bias cheap shot. Scattered in every way, Lee's focus remains haphazard as he pontificates ham fistedly into nearly every scene which trail's off rather than resonate as this diffuse mess wanders from Crispus Attucks to BLM to make his point achieved so much more powerfully, summed up in one scene and decades earlier in Apocalypse, Now. Lee drags us through two and half hours to get to his. Speaking of Now, he does one of his heavy handed homages and manages to botch that as well.
A quartet of four Viet vets return to the heart of darkness to retrieve their fallen leader and a huge gold supply. An abrasive but basically altruistic bunch they have to enlist some shady characters which leads to conflict while they sought out their inner one.
As in many of his films we get the loose cannon threatening to upend everything and DelRoy Lindo does an excellent job here as the tortured veteran with the short fuse. Pursued by inner demons from the past he brings power to all his scenes, something lacking in the rest of Lee's bland undeveloped cast delivering banal dialogue. Lee utilizes his usual go to crutch of pop music well and the documentary footage in the early going really revs matters up but it quickly devolves into another Lee one note mantra as his band of brothers rumble through the jungle in a funk with the occasional burst of automatic weapons fire to keep the audience awake. Da 5 Bloods is a passionate but diffuse mawkish mess, unconvincingly told.