Another Joyless Spike Lee Joint

Rating: 3/10 (12 June 2020)

First off, let's remember once again that Spike Lee is not a good filmmaker. He's never BEEN a good filmmaker. The otherwise inexplicably boundless patience and goodwill the media and the industry have repeatedly shown his film student-level back catalogue can only be explained through a desire to be complimentary towards him simply because of his skin colour. Which is pretty demeaningly racist in itself, when you think of it. It would be lovely to have some great black filmmakers in the world (or even one) but Spike Lee is not it.
Lee is incapable of making compelling stories with believable, engaging characters in them, and everything wrong with his other films are just as wrong with this: 'Da 5 Bloods' is preachy, overlong, racially antagonistic, staggeringly self-indulgent and clumsily unbelievable in every way at every turn. Anytime any topic that could be considered even slightly political pops its head up, the scene stops and Lee starts sermonizing. The arrogance of Spike Lee shaming black people into voting (and thinking) how he wants does not seem that far off to me from Joe Biden telling them "if you don't vote for me, you ain't black!"
But okay, enough about that.
The opening scenes, summing up the mood of the Vietnam War years, are powerful, if manipulative, and the use of Marvin Gaye's peerless "Inner City Blues" is well-used and welcome. But then the actual story begins and if it wasn't a black cast, we would all be talking about it as if it were a Chuck Norris/Steven Seagal straight-to-video turkey. The actual Vietnam flashbacks look like they came from an episode of The A-Team (with the same music).
Every non-black character is a prop, there to just perform a single function and then leave, with no insight into their inner thoughts, feelings, or desires. But the lead cast aren't any better: one of the guys is a Trump supporter, so he does all the bad stuff; the rest are largely interchangeable and instantly forgettable. Nothing memorable is said by anyone, and the script is third rate throughout. The best line in the whole damn movie is Jean Reno saying "I thank you for this ignorant American one-sided version of World War Two".
Even the scene where they find the gold is a catastrophe: I don't want to give any spoilers, but if you stop to think about the breathtaking unlikelihood of how it is hit upon, in the middle of hundreds of miles of jungle, it should tell you a lot about the rest of the reasoning on display in the rest of this disaster.
Lee has this amazing cast of black actors, who've all proven themselves unforgettable in other roles (with white filmmakers), and instead of allowing them to shine with complexity, nuance, wit and humour, he forces them to perform these dumbed-down stereotypes, fit for an 80s made-for-TV soap opera. Everything is so crass, unsubtle, haphazard and over-the-top.
This film could have been amazing: a profound, insightful, surprising and spellbinding take on adventure movies with a similar theme, like Three Kings or The Man Who Would Be King or Treasure of the Sierra Madre, from an all-black perspective. But to even mention those masterpieces in the same sentence as this is an insult. It's as dumb as a bag of rocks. Please stop giving this man money to make bad B-movies.