Spike Lee’s film ‘Da 5 Bloods’ misses every mark
Every so often Spike Lee makes a movie that inspires the wrong kind of wonder – as in, “I wonder what happened to Spike Lee.”
As with Woody Allen, the range in quality between Lee’s best and worst work could make you imagine that each were made by different people – except no. All Spike Lee movies are unmistakable products of the same artistic personality.
As for his new film, “Da 5 Bloods,” everything about it is off, except for Lee’s instinct for the social and political moment. In “Blackkklansman” (2018), he added an epilogue about the neo-nazis in Charlottesville that elevated a very good movie into something near greatness. In “25th Hour” (2002), he took a story about a drug dealer’s last day of freedom and turned it into the ultimate expression of post-9/ 11 New York.
With “Da 5 Bloods,” he begins the movie with a montage of footage from the early ’70s, in which Angela Davis says, “We may very well face a period of full-blown fascism very soon.” You could hear a similar statement on MSNBC right now. There are also references to Black Lives Matter that had to have been included prior to the recent protests.
Yet “Da 5 Bloods” is a poor vehicle for these ideas. Clocking in at two and a half hours, it feels long after its first labored minutes. We meet four African-american veterans, all men in their late 60s, as they arrive in Vietnam for a last adventure. Through stilted, tin-eared dialogue, we discover that the four surviving “Bloods” have returned to find and repatriate the body of their fallen leader — and to find millions of dollars in buried gold.
The dialogue remains a problem throughout, in that the characters don’t talk like people. Instead they work to help the movie make its points by announcing everything they’re thinking and feeling.
Paul (Delroy Lindo), suffering from post-traumatic stress, announces, “I’m a broken man.” In another scene, one of the men says that they need to “repossess” the gold “for every single black boot that never made it home.”
At one point, their dead platoon leader (Chadwick Boseman) is described as “our Martin and our Malcolm.” Why not let the audience discover that, rather than give these flashback scenes too much to live up to?
And, though this is a small thing, why name this leader
Norman, and why have him called “Stormin’ Norman,” when it evokes, for anyone old enough to remember, the Persian Gulf War, another soldier altogether?
In one scene, Paul’s son ( Jonathan Majors), who is also on the trip, goes to a bar and strikes up a conversation with a French relief worker (Melanie Thierry). This begins two cringy minutes of actors struggling to bring life to something dead on the page. Scene after scene is like this, lacking realism or tension, with none of the honest give and take of real conversation.
The movie inserts a couple of film references that are weird, almost flailing. The men ride down the river in a boat, as the soundtrack blares “The Ride of the Valkyries.” This evokes “Apocalypse Now,” but why?
In another scene, a Vietnamese bandit tries to steal the gold and actually says, “I don’t need no stinkin’ badges.” That’s a line out of “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” which also had to do with gold, but so what?
The flashbacks to Vietnam are just plain odd, in that the actors — Lindo, Isiah Whitlock, Jr., Clarke Peters and Norm Lewis — all play themselves at 20 years old. So, you have these older men being led by Boseman, who is decades younger. Such scenes make you realize that the movie should have been set in the late 1980s. The men would have been younger and nothing would have been lost, except the references to today’s politics.
Anyway, think about it: If you buried millions of dollars in gold when you were 20, would you wait until you were pushing 70 before you dug it up? Does that even make sense? Wouldn’t the idea of being rich appeal to you many, many years before that? Would you really wait until you were so old that you’d have to worry about throwing your back out when you picked up the loot?
In the end, “Da 5 Bloods” feels like a clumsy hybrid of two fine impulses — to make a heist movie set in Vietnam, and to make a statement about race in 2020. Alas, each intention doesn’t serve the other, and so both go unrealized.
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