Jumble In The Jungle

Rating: 6/10 (13 June 2020)

There's a rushed feel to Da 5 Bloods, as if everything was thrown at it as fast as possible and put together without waiting to see what sticks. 4 old black guys go back to Vietnam, the son of one of them tags along, to search for the remains of a fallen colleague and maybe find some lost gold bullion. So far, so good, in an Apocalypse Now meets Three Kings kind of way.
Everyone meets up and enjoys a night out on the town before heading into the jungle on their quest, which is all fun and games as the characters are introduced. Delroy Lindo is the big MAGA man, a forceful my-way-or-the-highway presence who doesn't need or want anyone's help. Clarke Peters is Mr Sensible, the smooth that holds everyone's rough edges together. Isiah Whitlock is the joker in the pack, and Norm Lewis is the flash guy. Obvs, they all have their faults which have to get exposed, because that's the kind of film it is.
The trouble starts once they head into the jungle. everything looks like they walked along a trail to get to a spot to shoot, and then took five steps into the trees. It really looks like they're on a camping holiday and decided to shoot a movie while they were at it. They don't ever seem to endure the hardships of outdoor living so much as potter around slightly of trail for a bit before being cheaply rewarded by a hackneyed plot device - eyes roll rather than heads.
Because they complete their objectives so easily there's nothing been invested in their struggle. There's been no drama at all other than a few flashbacks to Chadwick Boseman, his righteous charm guiding them to victory over an ambush before the inevitable befalls him and sets in motion the 50 or so years wait for his buddies to go back and find him. Yeah, it's a hokey AF premise.
After the gold is found things kick off like a rejected Chuck Norris script. There's bad guys who can't shoot straight. There's good guys who spray bullets everywhere randomly without much by way of a need to conserve ammo. There's CGI puffs of blood that stand in such stark contrast to the real life footage shown earlier of Nguyen Van Lem being shot in the head, and how death by gunfire really looks - it makes Da 5 Bloods action sequences look like a COD video game in comparison. Awful. If you're going to use real world documentary footage of what actually happened to help set the tone of your story then tonally you need to have some grit, not cheap fluff.
There's too much going on and none of it feels particularly well thought out to be anything other than a first pass at what could have been something with depth.
On the upside, Whitlock and Peters are as watchable as ever - Peters is the glue that holds this all together. Lindo desperately needed better dialogue to get his acting chops around as he had the most showy bits, that he elevated what he had to work with to where he got to says more about his skills than that of the writers.
Everyone else in the movie is a plot device, there to be used to create a reason for something to happen rather than to breathe life into situations.
Maddeningly disappointing.