Da 5 Bloods is sadly topical

In the 1930s Warner Brothers became notorious for a series of socially relevant crime movies like The Public Enemy (1931), Dead End (1937) or The Roaring Twenties (1939). Looking back almost a century on, with a gaze devoid of context, we see them now as rattling good thrillers which made stars of the likes of James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart.

What we do not often realise is how controversial these films were at the time. They were often billed as being ‘ripped from today’s headlines’ and their stories of street kids, bootleggers, and glamorous gangsters were seen as being reflective of - and a threat to - the social order of Depression-era America.

The same might be said about Spike Lee’s remarkable new film Da 5 Bloods (2020) which is similarly, but much more sadly, relevant to the times in which it is set. Lee is possibly the most political film maker in the industry, and it would be unthinkable for him not to make comment on the Black Lives Matter movement. His last film BlacKkKlansman (2018) was an eloquent condemnation of race and racism in America, especially in its shocking finale, but Da 5 Bloods, for me, goes further.

It’s not just that the film drops on Netflix only days after the death of George Floyd and the global eruption  of protest that followed his killing, its more what Lee’s film has to say about the sad continuum in which this death finds itself.

Da 5 Bloods is set in the present day with four African American former G.I.s returning to Vietnam for the first time since their last tour of duty. Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis) and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr) have come on a sentimental journey. They want to locate the grave of their former squad leader Norman (Chadwick Boseman) and repatriate his remains.

Despite the backslapping, fist-pumping camaraderie and bonhomie it is quickly obvious that they were not the men they once were. Paul has become a Trump-boosting MAGA supporter, Otis has an opioid addiction and a secret Vietnamese daughter, while Eddie and Melvin are also much changed. The spontaneous arrival of Paul’s son David (Jonathan Majors) hints at a greater concern.

The reasons for the trip are not purely sentimental. They also want to recover a load of gold bullion that was ‘lost’ on their watch. The hunt for the treasure very quickly turns this into a very effective updating of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) as they try to get the gold out of the country while being pursued by their double-crossing backers.

It is just possible – but only just if you had been living in a cave – to see Da 5 Bloods as a conventional action movie. A sort of rollicking Over the Hill gang type of story where – unlike The Irishman (2019) – there is no digital jiggery pokery to de-age the stars. They appear as their 21^st century selves in the flashback sequences, possibly because in their minds they are still the same vital, virile young men who went in country.

Spike Lee however is not about to let the audience off the hook so easily. Although he has some fun with aspect ratios that rather makes you want to see this on a big screen, the gadfly in Lee constantly provokes and discomfits. Just as he did in BlacKkKlansman, real life intrudes frequently into the narrative as Lee provides an uncomfortable civics lesson.

This, to my knowledge, is the first serious depiction of the African American perspective on Vietnam. It was touched on in Dead Presidents (1995) by the Hughes brothers, but that was more about the aftermath of the conflict. Lee’s view here is that there is no aftermath. The film is summed up by the Bloods Vietnamese guide (Johnny Nguyen) who says: ‘After you’ve been in a war you understand it never really ends’.

For Spike Lee and the characters in this film there is the sense that Vietnam was a skirmish in a wider war that African Americans have been fighting for more than 200 years and which shows little sign of ending. Delroy Lindo’s performance as a man trying to come to terms with who he was and what he has become is a career-best for a very fine actor, however it is also the dilemma of his generation in microcosm.

The film is far from perfect; it is overlong and in places the story wanders like the Mekong River. But it has raw power and emotion – nowhere more so than in the final twenty minutes – that makes it linger in the memory.

It also confirms that Spike Lee, one of the world’s great filmmakers, is back on top of his game making films that could be ripped from today’s headlines.