There’s no way to look cool in a MAGA hat. I mean, you can try, Delroy Lindo (Lord knows he tried A LOT); you can bend it, break it, wear it backwards, and even execute genuine sweaty he-man work in such, and, still, the message of hateful cruelty will prevail. The MAGA hat itself is, ironically as MAGA stands for no such thing, a true beacon of equality for each member that bears such, no matter what race, creed, color, age, gender, appearance, or sexual orientation, is a giant dick.
It’s fascinating that Spike Lee –no fan of Trump- made one of Da 5 Bloods a MAGA ringwraith. Obviously the picture was filmed well before the George Floyd inspired protests; if there were any doubt that MAGA or Trump stood for anything positive before 2020, such has been erased quite thoroughly by now. But I digress; this film is reclaiming Vietnam for a handful of black men who left a great deal on the battlefield fifty years ago.
Seventysomethings Paul, Otis, Eddie, and Melvin (Lindo, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, Isiah Whitlock Jr.) have returned to Vietnam where they were soldiers decades ago. In a way, they have returned to fight the war all over. Arriving on a premise of retrieving a fallen comrade (Chadwick Boseman), the four are actually present to retrieve a cache of gold bars stolen and hidden during the war. The bars were intended for locals who helped fight the Viet Cong on the side of Americans but never received their bounty. The film is mostly told in the present day with four old men trekking through the Vietnamese countryside, but the film also lets us spy on the events that went into Da 5 Bloods claiming the gold for themselves fifty years ago.
One intriguing gambit is Spike Lee chose not to change actors to represent their GI-year-old selves. I won’t get into whether or not the timing works – it does and it doesn’t—what is odd is seeing old men fighting the Vietnam War. A big coup to this gambit, however, is that the audience spends no time whatsoever trying to figure out who is who.
The scenes in this film are a little on the long side. Spike Lee loves to indulge and could use an editor for several scenes, especially one where a wistful PTSD Paul has it out with a local river vendor. There’s also the part where the film completely switches gears from an adventure reminiscence to an action thriller. Did we need that? I’m not sure. Had it been edited tighter in the first place, I don’t think the film need necessarily have devolved into Triple Frontier.
Da 5 Bloods sells itself as an African-American perspective on the Vietnamese War, which I applaud. I feel like we haven’t had one of those since Platoon and even then it was shown through the filter of a white kid. Spike Lee sprinkles in an extended history lesson during his flashback sessions demonstrating the 1960s-1970s black perspective which was, of course, overrepresented in terms of troops and deaths, but underrepresented in terms of politics and power. From this vantage point, the film works. However, there is also a thriller here about retrieving long lost gold. I can’t make an honest argument that our heroes have top claim on the booty … and it seems like a good way of attracting others -violent others- whose claim is equally as untenable. This part of the picture is a mixed bag. It allowed for at least one moment of edge-of-your-seat excitement, yet at the same time it made the film much bloodier than it should have been and –in my mind at least- it undermined the reunion. Reducing the cause of African-American slaughter in the name of a short-sighted and overly aggressive foreign policy to some sort of treasure hunt cheapens the message of the picture. The film has merit, but why oh why are you re-fighting a war that didn’t do much good for anybody in the first place?
Four men return to the stories they told
Seeking closure for their youth that was sold
Oh, and by the way
There’s a precious cache
Did we say “closure?” This is really about gold
Rated R, 154 Minutes
Director: Spike Lee
Writer: Danny Bilson & Paul De Meo and Kevin Willmott & Spike Lee
Genre: History lesson/treasure hunt
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: People looking to kill three hours of pandemic time without falling asleep
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Poor Vietnamese villagers
