OVP: Da 5 Bloods (2020)

Film: Da 5 Bloods (2020)

Stars: Delroy Lindo, Jonathan Majors, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, Isiah Whitlock, Jr., Chadwick Boseman

Director: Spike Lee

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Few modern filmmakers understand the concept of cinema & spectacle quite like Spike Lee.  Lee belongs on a very short list of modern filmmakers who have a distinctive style, voice, & remain relevant decades after they came onto the scene.  Every film, even his newest ones, could be a landmark in his filmography, and with him now taking on the title of "two-time Oscar winner" after his last film, Da 5 Bloods asks the question of whether or not he can handle being put into the place he probably should've always been-one of the celebrated voices of his cinematic generation.  This is his first followup to BlacKKKlansman, and Lee uses that film's box office & goodwill to make a huge film, one that talks about race, war, and commerce in ways that are familiar to followers of his work.  Unfortunately, Da 5 Bloods also hearkens to other filmmakers when they get the kind of leave that Lee gets with this movie (after his award-winning last picture), feeling indulgent & in dire need of editing.

(Spoilers Ahead) The plot of Da 5 Bloods feels relatively simple on its surface.  Four Vietnam veterans return to the country to recover the body of their fallen squad leader Norman (Boseman), but also are intent on finding an enormous amount of gold they were carrying (from the US government) that was never delivered to the Lahu people during the war.  Strife breaks out quickly in the group as Paul (Lindo) is a Trump-supporting, confrontational man who is clearly suffering from PTSD, and is also being followed by his son David (Majors), who knows that his father is unwell.  When they find th gold, they also encounter a series of land mines, which kills one of the veterans, Eddie (Lewis), and nearly kills David.  During this, Paul takes three landmine advocates hostage (to the protest of the rest of the group), and they encounter a group of gunmen hired by a French businessman who wants the gold for himself.  The group splits up, with Paul going his own way, where we learn (in a vision from Norman) that he accidentally killed Norman during a raid during the War, and he is shot by the gunmen.  Eventually David and the remainder of the landmine advocates & veterans kill the remaining members of the gunmen's coalition, and they share the gold with the widows of the men that died, as well as with Black Lives Matter and landmine advocacy groups.

The film borrows, sometimes wholesale, from a lot of movies.  This is not Lee's first war film (he also made 2008's Miracle at St. Anna), so it's surprising how often he's clearly borrowing from other movies.  If you can't see the lines to Apocalypse Now! and Platoon, you need to put down your phone as you aren't paying attention (even though it's Netflix).  This isn't bad (paying homage is never a bad thing, particularly when you're a director like Lee who knows & loves movies), but it sometimes feels like he's ripping off these movies, taking so much of them that you can't tell if he's acknowledging it or if it's supposed to be a joke.

This is because Da 5 Bloods is a movie with a lot of ideas but way too little cohesion.  The movie wants to talk about racism, particularly when it comes to the barbaric way men-of-color are forced to fight wars for a country that doesn't give them equality on their home soul, but it also wants to be a movie about the fraught relationship within the black community, and it also wants to be a treatise about fathers & sons (and the generational gap between the Baby Boomers and their Millennial children)...and it also wants to be a standard-fare heist film, which Lee is very good at (one underrated film on his resumé is 2006's Inside Man, which is elevated popcorn fare, and really excellent).  It succeeds in none of these things, as it tries to be too big.  Lee, like Quentin Tarantino & Steven Spielberg in recent years, is a filmmaker who didn't have someone on set who would tell him "no" and he created a movie without focus & that is at least 40 minutes too long.  The film also has issues with sexism (which, even in his best work, is a persistent problem with Spike Lee's movies), having the two most significant female characters in the movie be a hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold and a French woman who is basically there to seduce Jonathan Majors in multiple scenes.

Convoluted movies can house good performances, and the acting in Da 5 Bloods is solid.  Chadwick Boseman is getting Oscar buzz for this, and he does have one big moment at the end of the film, but it feels more like people are struggling watching him play a ghost (and wanting to honor his memory, as the film does) than this being an A+ performance (Majors, for example, has a much better role if you needed a Supporting Actor play from this movie).  The rest of the cast is solid, if not always spectacular, and the choice of Norm Lewis feels like a problem (Lewis was 11 in real life when the Vietnam War ended, and is too young to be playing this part).

But it's impossible to talk about this movie without speaking about Delroy Lindo.  Lindo, a character actor you've seen in everything from The Cider House Rules to Gone in 60 Seconds to The Good Fight knows that he's getting his moment-in-the-sun and takes it.  The movie is a showcase for him, giving him repeated monologues to nail, juicy complicated backstory to play, and even a death scene (I said spoiler alert for a reason).  There are times when it's too much, when we're getting diminishing returns, and occasionally it's hard to watch (Paul is not a bad guy, but he's certainly not what you'd consider an easy man to like).  But Lindo at his best in this movie is some titanic acting, a character actor unleashed, and this will be the defining performance of his career (and will probably get him an Oscar nod, one that will not elicit any complaints from me even if I haven't finalized my own five Best Actor nominees).  It's hard not to think about how much better his work here might've been had he gotten a movie that could have assisted the acting he was giving it.