Movie Review: Spike Lee’s Extraordinary ‘Da 5 Bloods’

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Make Lee great again. These are words you might have muttered to yourself when the ultra-fluid mind behind Do the Right Thing — beset by funding problems and a general lack of purpose — was shooting films like Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (a horror movie about a cursed dagger).

Fortunately, the stars aligned for BlacKkKlansman and here we are. Lee’s second war movie is dominated by a black man who loves Trump.

To put it mildly, Vietnam vet Paul (Delroy Lindo, London-born and raised), is NOT woke. And he probably wouldn’t be a fan of the Black Lives Matter protests currently transforming the world’s political landscape. But he’s a great character. Paul is one of four buddies who return to ’Nam to do right by their leader, Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman), killed on the battlefield and denied a proper burial. Paul, Otis (Clarke Peters; delicious), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr) are also after a chest of gold they hid last time around, its whereabouts revealed by satellite images to which they’ve recently gained access.

They arrive in a Ho Chi Minh City that looks and sounds pungently real. Otis’s former Vietnamese lover helps them make a deal with a frosty Frenchman (Jean Reno) and having gained a new addition — Paul’s teacher son, David (Jonathan Majors) — the gang head for the jungle.

Da 5 Bloods is the first movie I’ve seen since lockdown began that made me yearn to be in a packed cinema. It might have been funded by Netflix but the story has been designed to get a reaction from crowds — to make them not only think about injustice, systemic racism, sexism, and the horrors of landmines but also guffaw at snakes and roar the words “look behind you!” Fortnite-obsessed 11-year-olds will “get” it. So will anyone who loved Girls Trip.

While all the characters are damaged, Paul’s prejudice and self-loathing and greed are what drives the movie. He spits out the word “gooks” as if applying balm to an infected wound. By the end of the movie he’s looking into the camera and screaming: “You will not kill Paul!”

He’s a victim of trauma-induced schizophrenia. He’s a figment of his creator’s imagination, fighting for his meta-narrative life. Whatever way you look at Paul, his anguish is raw to the touch.

Though Lindo is and always has been brilliant (and has worked with Lee several times before), he’s less well known, which makes him just right to play a man who’s sick of being sidelined. And Majors makes almost as big an impression. Unless you’ve seen him in the quirky indie epic The Last Black Man in San Francisco (in which he played a shy outsider), the 30-year-old will be an unknown quantity. Less of a Stormin’ Norman than a Docile David, he’s the ying to Boseman’s yang. He’s also this film’s secret weapon, utterly crucial to an ending that will lift your spirits and make you want to take to the streets.

Courtesy of Rotten Tomatoes.

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