Streaming on Netflix - Rod Bishop reviews DA 5 BLOODS (Spike Lee, USA, 2020)

Hard to fault the timing of this, Spike Lee’s latest Joint, released only days ago on Netflix. 

It’s a 156-minute Black Lives Matter message told through African American rewrites of Apocalypse Now and The Treasure of Sierra Madre, backed by sympathetic history lessons on the immorality of The Vietnam War. Or The American War as it is known to the locals.

It’s a wild ride as four black Viet Vets return to ’Nam ostensibly looking for the mortal remains of good friend Stormin’ Norman, their former commanding officer. In reality, they are looking for a fortune in gold bullion, now a cache buried in the jungle, but originally meant for the Lahu people who helped the South Vietnamese.

If, in the end, Da 5 Bloods is as big a mess as Apocalypse Now this is no criticism of Spike Lee’s achievement. Coppola used the war to confront Big Themes and his various set pieces are better remembered than the overall coherence of his script. Unlike Coppola, there’s no missing Lee’s Big Themes, but some of his wonky plot contrivances are dubious including a group of white activists last seen in a heavily populated Vietnamese town, but happening by chance to turn up unexpectedly in the same jungle as our black Vietnam vets. Fancy seeing you here!

Before we get to Vietnam, Lee montages us through the late 60s furore over the war and the black soldiers who come from a demographic of 11% of the USA population, but 32% of the US forces in Vietnam. They are asked to kill gooks and die for a country that treats them as racially inferior.

Production still, Spike Lee (middle rear)

This ingrained, racist USA and the gut-wrenching lethal attitude to black lives is breathed into all ingredients of the film. There are cinematic in-jokes including a homage to Walter Huston’s dance-jig from Sierra Madre and The Ride of the Valkyries laid over a boat inching its way into darkening jungles.

There are some masterful analogies including black soldiers and Vietnamese still killing each other in jungles, marionetted by a white man.

The unapologetic genre mash-up of Da 5 Bloods is all Spike Lee. His playful, vigorous direction underscores the historic exploitation and sacrifices made by African Americans for a country that appears to deeply resent, if not outright hate them. This is The Vietnam War through black eyes. 

There are well-meaning inclusions of the lasting effects of the war on the Vietnamese with a one-legged boy scaring the Vets with firecrackers and a chicken seller berating them for killing his parents. It’s all welcome and long overdue, even if it doesn’t come close to the reality of the Vietnamese statistics – 2 million civilians dead, 4.8 million sprayed with Agent Orange, 5.3 million wounded and 11 million driven off their lands.