Spike Lee's Latest Bleeds Out a Bit, Great at Times, Confusing at Others

Rating: 6/10 (16 June 2020)

I generally enjoy Spike Lee's films, and consider many of his movies to be required viewing for any contemporary film buff. I loved 2018's Blakklansman, so I figured that Da 5 Bloods on Netflix would be right up my alley.
The story of 5 black Vietnam vets returning to their former front, now-tourist-destination is sometimes charming, sometimes powerful, but all the time uneven.
There are some outstanding performance moments here, especially from Delroy Lindo, who I haven't seen in anything for a while, and the always charismatic Chadwick Boseman. There's interesting filmmaking touches, like all the other members of the Bloods being their current-day ages as they relive the combat memories, with only Boseman's character remaining young in the memories, as he never got a chance to age.
The 4 remaining alive have definite chemistry with each other, and in some of the comedic moments of the movie, had me in stitches with their jabs and insults at each other. There's occasional tense, confrontational moments that the vets have with Vietnam locals, and those scenes are taut and engaging because you can imagine that underneath the surface, there's still underlying resentment amongst many Vietnamese people towards the military and Americans in general. Those scenes flow well.
What doesn't work is when the movie brings us in with a comedic, almost Hangover-like vibe (I think Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicolsohn were in an old-guy version of The Hangover not too long ago, right?), and it lingers on this portion of the movie a while, also introducing elements like Otis' long-lost half-Vietnamese, half-black lovechild who he's never met, that he then has no other significant interaction with until the end of the movie. An entire film could've been made about him reconnecting with his estranged daughter, and they don't even get much dialouge together.
After they begin their treasure hunt for the gold that they stumbled on during the war, the movie turns towards a thriller-action vibe, stretching the limits of believability when the Bloods are still able to mow down modern Vietnamese fighters (although not without sacrifices on their end also). The intensity and extreme gore come out of nowhere, and the movie wasn't really marketed in this way, so it's pretty jarring.
Delroy Lindo's character, a black Trump supporter, is a commentary on many aspects of modern American society and how our country deals with its vets, however some of his jaunts off by himself, speaking to the camera, get awkward and sometimes unintentionally funny because of how blunt they are. To be clear, what he's going through or what he's saying *isn't* funny. The way that it's framed and displayed, with zero nuance or subtlety, is what made me laugh.
There's a lot of dialouge towards the beginning of the movie where The Bloods are getting guided around Vietnam, and they casually drop multiple black-history facts to one another in a very detailed and educationally explicit way. I have zero problems with a film displaying an angle of history that's too often left out of mainstream education. One of the reasons I enjoy Spike Lee's films is because of the perspective and the power he can convey from his experience.
However dialouge between fictional characters still has to sound like what people would say to each other, and I have a hard time swallowing that these grizzled old vets would be trading historical facts with one another in such a plucky way. If it was a scene of them educating or speaking to an ignorant white person? Their grandchildren? Sure, that could be powerful. But as it stands, this dialouge and a few other moments in the film where the characters speak so bluntly and openly about history in situations where you wouldn't go into that much detail; take you out of the film.
If Spike Lee wanted to make a documentary about black soldiers in Vietnam, I would watch the hell out of it, but if it's historical fiction, then commit to that.
Again, it's not all a mess. A scene where Delroy Lindo's character saves his soon from mortal danger is especially tense and very moving. Almost every scene Chadwick Boseman is in is touching. There's good chemistry amongst the leads, and Spike Lee knows how to move a camera, he's a cinematic master, so in terms of visuals, the movie is smooth and stylistic, with a choppy grain used on the scenes from the past, but not to the point that it looks distracting.
There was potential for a truly powerful story here, but I think Spike Lee should've chosen between a Nam film entirely set in the past with a young cast, or refrained on the amount of flashbacks with an aged cast, and gotten to the tension quicker.
I would say that if you're a Lee fan or a fan of the cast, then it's worth checking out. But in terms of Black History, Vietnam films, or other works from Spike Lee if you're a casual fan of his, then there's other works you can go towards other than this one, which clocks in around 2 and half hours.