Da 5 Bloods (2020, Spike Lee) (Patreon)

57/100

Not what I expected. 154 minutes suggests a sober-minded epic—of all Lee's films, only Malcolm X and Miracle at St. Anna run longer—and Da 5 Bloods' first hour, which is heavy on emotional reunions and Vietnam flashbacks, fits that impression pretty snugly. So I was caught completely off guard by the insanity that eventually erupts, turning what I'd thought was Lee's Space Cowboys (with a very different political bent, obviously) into something more like Southern Comfort. Trouble is, the second half feels disconnected from the first, rather than arising from it in ways that seem retroactively obvious. Lindo's direct-to-camera jungle monologues are amazing, but the character's previous mild irascibility in no way foreshadows such an extreme mental shift (even taking his MAGA mindset into account); one could argue that the land-mine horror triggers PTSD, I suppose, but Paul's behavior immediately after he rescues his son feels more frankly mercenary than trauma-inspired. Granted, he's also endured a lifetime of trauma having nothing to do with Vietnam, which is the point of Lee's numerous interpolated real-world references. The overall effect is too disjointed to cohere, though (especially when French colonialism gets tossed in as well!), and it doesn't help that the film bizarrely skips past a crucial dramatic stage: Paul goes so nuts that his fellow Bloods are forced to physically subdue him, at which point we cut directly from "Get the rope!" and Paul growling menacingly into the lens...to the group walking out of the jungle together as if nothing had happened. I have great difficulty imagining the interactions that would bridge that divide, and even minor characters, like Vinh, behave in ways that seem narratively convenient as opposed to psychologically plausible. 

Basically, this is one of those ultra-messy Spike Lee movies featuring a bunch of stuff I really like alongside a bunch of stuff that falls flat. In the former category, you've got Lindo's performance after Paul loses it; some of the guys' early badinage (and their group strut to "Got to Give It Up"); Lee's Godardian rhetorical flourishes (particularly Hanoi Hannah); the astonishingly potent use of isolated Marvin Gaye vocal tracks; and occasional startling complexities like subtitling wholly sympathetic Viet Cong dialogue (thereby complicating our response when the Bloods open fire, though the Bloods themselves presumably don't know they're mowing down guys who'd just been chatting amiably about a love poem somebody's wife had left in his backpack). Less effective, in my opinion, was the decision neither to recast nor digitally de-age the actors in '70s flashbacks—an intriguingly offbeat ploy that I think only works as intended if Boseman isn't there constantly calling attention to it (i.e., in a different film). Also, spatial precision isn't among Lee's many formal gifts—that initial firefight is visually indecipherable—and the Ostensibly Very Surprising Thing that occurs around the film's midpoint (kicking off the insanity) was tipped for me by the overly emphatic way he shoots someone "just walking around." (Didn't know what would happen, but it was way too obvious that something was about to happen.) Mostly, though, I wish that Da 5 Bloods' various disparate elements harmonized enough that I could come up with a better reaction than positive and negative laundry lists. Even the MLK footage at the end functions as summary only in the broadest (and thus the least impactful) possible sense. It's exciting to see Lee still throwing curveballs as his career enters its fifth decade, but this one didn't quite make it over the plate.

ANAL-RETENTIVE TITLE CORNER: Should this film be alphabetized under "D," "F," or "5"? Not a difficult question for me, thankfully: I treat numerals as if they're spelled out and have always chosen not to ignore articles in foreign languages. Le Trou comes just before A League of Their Own, etc. Same goes for modified English articles, I've now decided—would definitely file a movie called Ye Olde Whatever Whatever under Y, so Da 5 Bloods, meet Da (a long-forgotten '80s film starring Barnard Hughes and Martin Sheen). Didn't have to deal with this earlier, as I skipped Da Sweet Blood of Jesus.