Review of Da 5 Bloods (2020) by Marakai — 25 Aug 2020

Social and political commentary are certainly no strangers to a Spike Lee joint and Da 5 Bloods is no different. Arriving on the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter campaign, the release of the film couldn’t have been more pertinent given the story’s central theme.

On this occasion, Lee takes us to back to Vietnam where he’s able to explore the inequality of African-American soldiers who were under the impression that the very freedoms they were fighting for didn’t actually apply to them when they returned home to the U.

S. Lee adopts a back-and-forth chronology of the experiences of his characters during the war and the present day and intersperses it with historical facts that support his argument. It’s a clever technique and the film starts brightly as a result.

However, the narrative eventually becomes muddled as he opts for a gold fever riff of John Huston’s The Treasure Of Sierra Madre (complete with an unashamed nod to that film most famous line). Around this point, the film begins to feel sluggish and overlong and fails to maintain its earlier momentum.

It’s a respectable attempt at something different but ultimately it’s not one of Spike’s more refined works.