Da 5 Bloods: Spike Lee squeezes a mini-series worth of contrivances to get us from Vietnam to Black Lives Matter

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B-minus

 Spike Lee’s new Netflix movie, Da 5 Bloods, was shot last year in southeast Asia. But it turns out to be extraordinarily timely. 

The film draws a direct line between the civil rights struggles of the late ‘60s and the Vietnam war to the Black Lives Matter movement and the racial injustices that have sparked the mass protests of the past two weeks.

The opening – and best -- sequence, intersperses shots of Vietnam-era grunts, and clips of stirring speeches by Black leaders of a half-century ago -- Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Angela Davis. “If the link-up is not made between what’s happening in Vietnam and what’s happening here,” Davis says, “we may very well face a period of full blown fascism very soon.”

Grunts return to ‘Nam with a plan in Da 5 Bloods.

Unfortunately, Da 5 Bloods’ impassioned civics lesson is grafted on to a slapdash B-movie action plot. Lee and his BlacKkKlansman co-writer Kevin Willmott reworked a pre-existing return-to-Nam action script (by Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo) about army veterans on a mission to retrieve the remains of their revered squad leader, as well as a chest full of gold bullion.

We first meet Vietnam vets, Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr..) and Eddie (Norm Lewis) as they reunite at a Ho Chi Minh City hotel, clap hands and embrace, drink and reminisce, and do a dance in the hotel’s nightclub, as they prepare for their mission back to the jungle.

Over the next two and a half hours, the movie shifts from middle-aged comedy, political manifesto to family melodrama and carnage-filled action flick, adding up to a mini-series worth of incidents. The connection between civil rights history and the fictional narrative is through the character of the dead man, the semi-mythical Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman) who “was our Martin and our Malcolm.”  We meet the First Infantry’s Bloods’ squad leader as he justifies his plan to steal a chest full of U.S. gold bullion from the wreckage of a plane as a form of reparations for African Americans’ generations of sacrifice, which he lays out in detail: “I say, the USA owe us. We built this bitch.”

Back in the contemporary world, as the middle-aged men gear up for their jungle trek, it’s clear that the grizzled PTSD victim Paul is deeply troubled, as evidenced by the Make America Great again cap he wears (in honor of the politician Otis calls “President Fake Bone Spurs”). 

Initial differences are brushed over, and the vets are accompanied by their Vietnamese guide, war baby, Vinh (Johnny Nguyen) and Paul's son, David (Jonathan Majors), who shows up unexpectedly, worried about his father’s mental health. 

The cast is also self-consciously pebbled with representative types, including a former prostitute with a mixed-race daughter, and a couple of French characters, representatives of Indochina’s colonial past. One is an idealistic young heiress and anti-landmine activist named Hedy (Mélanie Thierry), the other a criminal named Desroches (Jean Reno). Both chain-smoke, presumably to remind us that they’re French. 

Another chain-smoker is a sultry North Vietnamese radio siren called Hanoi Hannah (Veronica Ngo), who targets the Black soldiers by playing soul music, and listing reasons why they should not fight for a country that has abused them. 

In the second half, tangled up in shoot-outs and stand-offs, much of the dramatic weight is carried by Lindo’s Paul, who assumes the Colonel Kurtz role here, becoming progressively more unhinged, leading to hallucinations and direct-to-camera soliloquies. Lindo is a formidable actor, but the sheer length of his scenes of madness blunt their impact.

For stretches, Da 5 Bloods distracts from the cracks in the script with its robust performances and Lee’s typical visual and musical panache. Cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel demarks present day and 1971 scenes with different aspect ratios and film stocks. And Terence Blanchard’s symphonic score weaves in and out between soul music from The Chambers Brothers and, extensively, Marvin Gaye.

Lee’s concluding scenes, through some contrivance, bring us to a Black Lives Matters rally, and an unsettling transition to reality.  If we could still step out of cinemas onto the streets, we would feel like walking into the next act of Lee’s movie. 

Da 5 Bloods. Directed by Spike Lee. Written by Danny Bilson, Paul Demeo, Kevin Willmott and Spike Lee. Starring: Delroy Lindo, Jonathan Majors, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Chadwick Boseman. Da 5 Bloods is availble on Netflix as of June 12.