Lindo’s performance, though, is achingly specific, rigorously human scaled. That’s an order!” Knowing they’re fighting an immoral war, knowing they have nothing against the Viet Cong. Between these two bookends is a heist movie of sorts, albeit one with far more on its mind than its plot details would suggest. “Second Unit is a Very Broad Label”: DP Newton Thomas Sigel on Da 5 Bloods | Filmmaker Magazine filmmakermagazine.com - Matt Mulcahey. It’s also an argument with and through the history of film. Parents need to know that Da 5 Bloods is Spike Lee's first film made for Netflix. The men themselves initially seem to fit the usual types—there’s the joker, Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), the level-headed medic, Otis (Clarke Peters) and the one who achieved the most post-war success, Eddie (Norm Lewis). A deep thinker and a shrewd tactician, Norman has taken on almost mythical grandeur in his comrades’ memories. Spike Lee narrates a sequence from his Netflix feature. But Lee has always been a master of using the cinematic tropes that have always worked as an okey-doke: the left hand lures you in with the familiar before the right hand blindsides you with the unexpected punching power of the intended point. We control our rage.” But it was about to— to be the jump off for those black soldiers. His attempts to expand the frame and correct the record have changed the course of the cultural mainstream. 0. Lee uses them to highlight another commonality: their strenuous opposition to the Vietnam War. Lee has crafted an exciting, violent film that can be enjoyed as strictly that, but what elevates it to greatness is what it says and what it shows about the perception of Blackness, whether in heroic situations or human ones. Plus: A film reflecting on the legacy of … They were asked to kill and die in a morally dubious undertaking in the service of a country that refused to treat them as full citizens. It’s not even Lee’s worst war movie. The Mandalorian Chapter 16 Recap: May the Force Be With You, The Essential Fellini is a Wonderful Gift for Cinephiles, Nomadland Leads 2020 Chicago Film Critics Nominations, The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone. Cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel handles it well, shooting some extraordinarily gorgeous and horrific images while fiddling with the aspect ratio in ways I found too clever to be annoyed with—one change occurs during an old-fashioned wipe, while another manifests itself with a dramatic opening of the screen. The truth of this observation is borne out in various ways, some of them bluntly literal. “Stand down! Thank god it didn’t. NOW PLAYING: other Da 5 Bloods: Video Review Common Sense Media. Paul would rather do business with anyone else, but this is the hand they’re dealt, so the Bloods choose to play it. So, on the surface, we have the story of four Vietnam vets who have returned to the country that bonded them in battle to claim a treasure they buried several decades ago. Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods kicks off a major summer for black cinema: Review Spike Lee's latest is one of his best. The Bloods gave their leader the nickname “Stormin’ Norman,” and he is spoken about in the reverent tones one reserves for folk heroes. And this scene is skillfully intercut with archival footage of many of those over 122 cities that were aflame— black folks enraged. The gold itself is just as big a MacGuffin, except here it’s also a deus ex machina of sorts, pulling out of the ether a note of hopeful uplift that ties the fictional story to a much-desired, reality-based outcome that’s almost too good to believe but wonderful to behold. Some of the faces and voices are familiar, and the lesson is clear. ‘Da 5 Bloods’ Review: Black Lives Mattered in Vietnam, Too Spike Lee’s new joint is an anguished, funny, violent argument with and about American history, with an … Hawaiian-print shirts, tropical drinks, OxyContin bottles and assault weapons. It is she who tells the Bloods about the death of Dr. King, and it is she who taunts them with the question of why they’re fighting for a country that will treat them like they’re second class citizens when they return. 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. ‘Da 5 Bloods’ Review: Black Lives Mattered in Vietnam, Too. When we touch down in the present, we are in a Ho Chi Minh City hotel where the four surviving bloods — Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), Eddie (Norm Lewis), Otis (Clarke Peters) and Paul (Delroy Lindo) — have gathered for what looks like an old-timers’ reunion tour. for strong violence, grisly images and pervasive language. The fifth blood of the title is not Paul’s son, David (Jonathan Majors), who unexpectedly shows up to join his elders’ crew, but their fallen comrade and squad leader, Norman, whose body they have been authorized to exhume so as to not raise suspicions about their other intentions. “He’s expensive,” she tells Otis before naming his price of 20% of the take. That’s what this scene is about. Da 5 Bloods recaps a long history of state-sponsored murder and abuse of Black people, and suppression of protests just like those against the recent police murders of … Each one of them confirmed this happened. Stormin’ Norman also puts the trunk of gold bars they discover in a downed CIA plane into context—he sees it as much deserved reparations, a repurposing of funds that were originally slated for Vietnamese people who provided information to the U.S. That gold can’t leave Vietnam in its current condition, so outside forces are necessary to assist. “You’re gonna have to kill me.” But also knowing their brothers and sisters are fighting for their justice, and that’s what this film is about— how we, as descendants of slaves, have fought for this country from day one. After playing real-life Black legends like James Brown, Thurgood Marshall, and Jackie Robinson, not to mention the fictional king of Wakanda, Boseman doesn’t need to overplay his mythical status. Da 5 Bloods: Video Review More From Common Sense Media UP NEXT. In country, again: from left, Jonathan Majors, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Norm Lewis and Delroy Lindo in Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods.”. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here. Paul hates the French, the Vietnamese, hell, everybody practically. In addition to the verbal commentary about present events vs. past ones, Lee also employs some sly visual representations of his points. It doesn’t always hold together, but it never lets go. From every angle, the situation was a mess, a quagmire. Running in parallel with these criticisms are blatant homages to other films, and not just war movies like “Apocalypse Now,” which gets a visual name-check as the main characters do a pseudo-Soul Train line boogie to Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give it Up.” A big chunk of “Da 5 Bloods” pays tribute to John Huston’s masterful 1948 adaptation of B. Traven’s classic parable of greed, “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” Like that film, the plot involves a search for gold, though unlike Humphrey Bogart and John’s dad, Walter, the main characters here have a good idea where the treasure is. The story, about the lethal consequences of a search for buried gold, is struck from the template of “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” A journey upriver from Ho Chi Minh City into the Vietnamese interior recalls “Apocalypse Now,” which the characters have all seen. Lee, who wrote the script with Danny Bilson, Paul DeMeo and Kevin Willmott, doesn’t escape from the exoticism that has characterized most American movies about Vietnam, and he doesn’t pursue the connections between black-power politics and international anti-imperialism as far as he might have. Tien is now a major financial broker who puts him in touch with a shady French businessman named Desroche (Jean Reno). Spike Lee Netflix! Running time: 2 hours 34 minutes. So you can make the case that we’ve been more patriotic than anybody. As expected, Lee gets excellent performances out of his cast straight down the line and is unafraid to coax out moments of love and affection to undercut the expected machismo of his Bloods. Directed by Spike Lee. It is he who educates the Bloods on the history of Black and brown people dying for a country that doesn’t love them back, starting with Crispus Attucks and ending with Milton Olive III, who dove on a grenade to save his platoon and was the first African-American awarded the Medal of Honor in Vietnam. (Oddly enough, Lee’s penchant for wonderfully crazy monikers for his characters is relegated to Reno’s; French speakers will benefit from a great visual play on “Desroche” later in the film.) Instead of using digital de-aging or look-alike casting, Lee places Whitlock, Lindo, Peters and Lewis alongside Boseman in the flashback scenes, which creates a sense of the uncanny immediacy of memory. Several times, Lee will engage in these sorts of tangents, either with plot or real-life images and footage edited into the film. And in between the music, they would start with propaganda. Da 5 Bloods is not a catastrophe or embarrassment. Part of the Big Red One (the Army’s First Infantry Division), the men have come to look for the remains of their squad leader, Stormin’ Norman, who was killed in a firefight. “I see ghosts,” Paul says at one agonized point, and though the ghost he sees is Norman, the real specter in the room is the war itself. “Da 5 Bloods” jumps back and forth, though not too many times, between the Bloods’ tours of duty and the present day. Black Lives have to matter. When they first meet up in Ho Chi Minh City, shaking hands and busting chops, the other guys give Paul grief for his red MAGA baseball cap. In its anger, its humor and its exuberance — in the emotional richness of the central performances and of Terence Blanchard’s score — this is unmistakably a Spike Lee Joint. He runs the blogs Big Media Vandalism and Tales of Odienary Madness. The latter device is worked seamlessly into the narrative, sometimes to shocking and heartrending effect, and it often draws parallels, as Ali’s speech does in the first scene, between the poor Vietnamese citizens and the poor Blacks sent to fight them. Lee also works in ties between the French, who tried their hand at Vietnam, and the Americans, who, to quote Otis, “tried to feed us that anti-Commie Kool-Aid.” “Uncle Sam did no better in Vietnam than the French did,” Desroche tells Paul after the latter goes off on him regarding French weakness. Chadwick Boseman! With Delroy Lindo, Jonathan Majors, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis. The first person that died for this country in a war— the American Revolutionary War— was a black man, Crispus Attucks at the Boston Massacre. His pain is the motor and the moral of the story. You have to think long and hard to come up with a movie that focuses so intently on the aftermath of war on Black soldiers (“Mudbound” and “Dead Presidents” come to mind, but they also have other stories to tell.). As he has demonstrated his mastery of established genres (the biopic, the musical, the cop movie, the combat picture, and so on), he has also reinvented them, pointing out blind spots and filling in gaps. Steal from the best, as the adage goes, and “Treasure” is a vein worth mining. Da 5 Bloods foregoes CGI de-aging (or the simple act of casting younger actors) in its flashbacks. This is the opposite of a shortcoming. Alas, each intention doesn’t serve the other, and so both go unrealized. Into this expected heist movie scene, Lee introduces the topic of children who have been fathered by American G.I.’s during wars, with Peters and Lan playing the sequence in beautiful understatement before returning us back to the main story. We also deal with how the armed forces, the National Guard were sent out to quell the uprising— I’m not going to use the word riot. He’s anti-immigrant and, in what is no doubt a troll on the director’s part, Paul voted for the man an on-screen caption refers to as “President Fake Bone Spurs.” Paul even says “there were atrocities on both sides!” As far as trolling goes, however, Lee is playing the long game here. Tien (Le Y Lan), Otis’s former lover, is part of the scheme, in association with an unsavory Frenchman in a white linen suit (Jean Reno).