History Now

Rating: 5/10 (13 June 2020)

"Da 5 Bloods" is unmistakably a Spike Lee joint, but what is with Netflix and macho action movies set in a war-torn foreign land and featuring a heist or extraction of some kind. I mean, they comprise a significant block of their original releases of late and usually include a star taking a break from superhero flicks: "6 Underground" with Deadpool, "Triple Frontier" with Batman, "The Red Sea Diving Resort" with Captain America, all 2019, "Extraction" with Thor earlier this year and, now, here's Black Panther in Vietnam where his friends, fellow veterans and "bloods" are in search of gold to plunder. Oh well, credit to Lee and company for making a better movie than those prior ones. Unlike the others, "Da 5 Bloods" doesn't have the feel of merely exploiting an exotic locale and racial others, as it largely focuses on the Black veterans detestation of having fought in a war supposedly for freedom while lacking freedom back home, while a couple of the younger characters speak of choosing careers to assuage their guilt for their respective privileges. Moreover, there's a glimpse of modernized streets in Ho Chi Minh City, McDonald's and an "Apocalypse Now" themed club included, before the brothers in arms proceed into the jungle, with more than token representation throughout of Vietnamese characters, including interracial relationships, as well as of the French, the first Western colonizer of Indochina. Yet, evidence remains that this scenario was originally a predictable action-heist screenplay (the way one character conspicuously walks backwards in one scene--telegraphing what's about to happen especially bothers me) before Lee and company rewrote it for Black protagonists and introduced some rather unpredictable social commentary.
Indeed, Lee's racial didacticism is all over the place, ranging from Crispus Attucks to Martin Luther King Jr. and the present-day Black Lives Matter movement and the inclusion of a MAGA-hat-wearing, Trump-supporting member of the Bloods, but this scattered approach is somewhat supported by the premise of the characters revisiting their pasts, as well as by the historically-minded ones played by Chadwick Boseman and Jonathan Majors. As with much of Lee's oeuvre, as well as that of others, I'm less interested in simplistic lectures than in how such morals are supported stylistically. To my mind, such was the redeeming feature of Lee's last joint, "BlacKkKlansmen" (2018), which I found more interesting as a conflict between racist epics "The Birth of a Nation" (1915) with "Gone with the Wind" (1939) against the Blaxploitation flicks of the 1970s, from which Lee paid homage with his film's style, than for any historical racial conflict or commentary on the Trump administration.
Something similar is done with the look of "Da 5 Bloods" sometimes resembling that of footage from the era of the American-Vietnam War, with images at times consequently appearing soft or colors overly saturated. Characters also use their own 8mm motion-picture and a still-photography cameras. Apropos to its subject matter, then, the style, from 8mm, to 16mm, to 35mm and still photographs, is all over the place, as are the shifting aspect ratios. Rather incongruent, however, is that the same actors play their younger selves without the sort of de-aging technology employed for Netflix's "The Irishman" (2019), although I don't much mind this otherwise if one understands the flashbacks as past episodes as remembered as opposed to being from the perspective of a hypothetical objective observer. Of course, there are also the usual Lee trademarks of raving monologues and double dolly shots (as well as the relatively new addition of casting Isiah Whitlock, Jr. to recite his catchphrase from "The Wire" HBO series). Meanwhile, the greater cinematic relfexivity of "BlackKklansmen" is replaced here in part by music and radio, with a Marvin Gaye-infused soundtrack and stinging radio propaganda from Hanoi Hannah (Veronica Ngo). While some critics will be concerned with how Lee captures some current zeitgeist, especially given the film's release during the protests currently taking place across the nation and the world as of this writing, ultimately more interesting methinks is whether this historically-minded film, as with his past work, will stand the test of time.