Poorly-writtena adventure film masquerading as a war movie with a message

Rating: 2/10 (14 June 2020)

I got just over an hour into the movie before I had to turn it off due to the quality. This is a truly awful movie, and I have reached the point i have to question my own Spike Lee fandom. Everything he's done since Oldboy has been very bad, with the sole exception of maybe Blackkklansman which I thought was average.
This is his second worst film, only being outdone by the unwatchable "Da Sweet Blood of Jesus." (Similar titles ironically) And yet, his self-referencing that was cringe in the early 2010s is still ever-present. We get it. You're from Brooklyn, you went to Morehouse, you think Trump is the worst president ever... And yet you're still making these same points in a damn VIETNAM WAR movie without any care in the world about the quality of the story, characters, pacing, or acting. There wasn't a single redeeming quality of the movie. It was certainly the worst edited movie I've come across in awhile... I don't know what Spike Lee was thinking with the intermittent Ken Burns-style b-roll of history, but it was extremely corny and unnecessary.
I'm done with Spike. He's lost in his own ego at this point and a bunch of clueless liberal critics will just keep inflating it. Oldboy, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, Red Hook Summer, Chiraq, the She's Gotta Have It series... And now Da 5 Bloods. I believe the strength of 1990s and 80s work was in his cast but either way, I'm certainly not wasting another minute with this type of cheesy nonsense. It's hard to believe this came from the same guy who directed a masterpiece like Malcolm X.