Da 5 Bloods (2020)
Directed by Spike Lee
Four African-American Vietnam veterans return to Vietnam. They are in search of the remains of their fallen squad leader and the promise of buried treasure. These heroes battle forces of humanity and nature while confronted by the lasting ravages of the immorality of the Vietnam War.
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(A lifetime cinephile, Lee also references or cites Apocalypse Now, Rambo, Missing in Action, and other Vietnam War-related films).
Eddie rightly scoffs at “those Hollyweird motherfuckers trying to go back and win the Vietnam War,” meaning Sylvester Stallone, in the second “Rambo” flick (1985), and the strangely smiling Chuck Norris, in “Missing in Action” (1984).
The deeper we get into the movie, however, the clearer it becomes that this is less an homage to films like Apocalypse Now (which is explicitly referenced) and a criticism of things like First Blood, than a reworking of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
The characters themselves discuss Hollywood’s take on Vietnam vets with Rambo in First Blood .
It's in conversation with the years of media that has painted the North Vietnamese in broadly evil strokes, even name-checking the Rambo franchise.
The touchstones range from Rambo to Apocalypse Now , with some obvious quotes, and some more veiled references.
When the finale explodes in a standoff, Bloods becomes like any other overkill, trigger-happy action film — or like the Rambo movies that our guys in Bloods mock early on .
Eddie also has something to show them all, a photograph of Stormin' Norman ("Black Panther" himself, Chadwick Boseman), their squad and spiritual leader whose remains they have come to bring home.
Boseman’s star-making, Marvel hero “Black Panther”, is nothing compared to Stormin’ Norman’s sanctified icon.
Their objective is told through flashbacks where we find out squad leader “Stormin’ Norman” (“Black Panther” himself Chadwick Boseman) died in combat after stumbling upon a treasure trove of gold bricks.
There’s Otis (Clarke Peters, The Wire ), Melvin (Isiah Whitlock, Jr., BlacKkKlansman ), Eddie (Norm Lewis, Sex and the City 2 ), and Paul (Delroy Lindo, Get Shorty ), who are officially in the country to recover the body of their fifth compadre, Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman, Black Panther ) who served with them but was killed when the Bloods were defending a downed plane in 1971.
Their squad leader, Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman, Black Panther), suggests they bury the gold and come back for it when things have cooled down, but then he’s killed and the plan is put off several decades.
He reminded us of that a week ago with his new “3 Brothers” video, which identifies the horrifying pattern connecting the murder of Radio Raheem in 1989’s “Do the Right Thing” to the more recent choking deaths of Floyd and Eric Garner.
And thus, it doesn’t match up as perfectly to America’s current moment as, say, his masterpiece Do the Right Thing does 31 years later.
The end result is a film is not a great Lee film on the order of “Do the Right Thing,” “Bamboozled” and “BlacKkKlansman” but the combination of the stuff that does work and Lee’s uncanny ability to make a movie whose ideas and concerns feel absolutely in sync with this particular moment in time, even though it was obviously made months ago, gives it the kind of spark that hasn’t been seen in a major film since “Parasite.”
In Do the Right Thing , Lee’s opus, his fondness for these rambling topical diatribes found its perfect sense of purpose in a looser, vignette-based narrative structure, a rebuke to standard plot-driven Hollywood, which evoked the thriving social ecosystem of a single neighborhood–its spaces and characters and passage of time.
That Lee should have achieved this victory in the same year that Do the Right Thing celebrated its 30th anniversary seemed significant, proving that this reliably provocative film-maker, now in his 60s, still had his finger on the pulse of modern America.
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(1995 saw a couple of other examples: the Vietnam vet crime drama Dead Presidents from the Hughes Brothers, and Preston A. Whitmore II’s The Walking Dead , about a POW rescue mission.)
They include A Soldier’s Story (1984), adapted from Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play, Glory (1989), The Walking Dead (1995), which starred Eddie Griffin as a mouthy, reluctant soldier in Vietnam alongside Joe Morton, Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna (2008), about black soldiers in the Italian theater of World War II, and Mudbound (2017) from Dee Rees, who studied under Lee at New York University before adapting the story of two soldiers, one black and one white, struggling together to overcome their experiences of fighting in World War I.
Along the way, to go with the many historical references, we get nods to Apocalypse Now , Treasure of the Sierra Madre , Rambo , Missing in Action , Platoon , The Seven Samurai , and any number of allusions I’m probably missing.
There is something terrifying, something terribly haunting and deranged about him, reminiscent of Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
Their plan is complicated by the unexpected arrival of David (The Last Black Man in San Francisco‘s John Majors), Paul’s estranged son, as well as the involvement of a shady French businessman Desroche (The Professional‘s Jean Reno).
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Try refreshing your browser, or Spike Lee's Vietnam War movie is equal parts thrilling and timely, says Chris Knight Back to video Enter Spike Lee, whose last feature, 2018’s BlacKkKlansman , won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay and was arguably robbed of another for best picture by the much safer race-relations movie Green Book .
When Green Book beat BlacKkKlansman for the Best Picture Oscar in 2019, Spike Lee took it with his characteristic sardonicism.
During the war, their leader Norman (Chadwick Boseman, "Avengers: Endgame") found a chest full of gold bars, which he marked for a special reason.
Relocating the gold trunk they discovered and bringing the remains of their platoon leader, Stormin Norman (Chadwick Boseman, Avengers: Endgame ) back for a proper burial.