Spike Lee’s hot streak continues as this gripping action melodrama about elderly Vietnam vets is one of Lee’s best movies and one of Netflix’s best originals yet.
Spike Lee’s hot streak continues with this dynamite action melodrama about elderly Vietnam vets, which is both one of Lee’s best movies and one of Netflix
NFLX’s best original films yet.
Da 5 Bloods is one of Spike Lee’s best movies and perhaps the best Netflix original I’ve ever seen. I tend to be overly cranky about Netflix original features, as too many of their films are either glorified direct-to-video schlock (The Last Days Of American Crime), studio rejects (The Cloverfield Paradox) or otherwise strong filmmakers left to their own devices with nobody to say “Well… how about this instead?” (Velvet Buzzsaw). And if Netflix is really trying to have a major cinematic footprint on par with a major studio, then that batting average needs to go up. That said, without having seen every single Netflix movie, Da 5 Bloods is absolutely up there with Roma, The Irishman and Mudbound as one of the very best of its kind.
Penned by Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo, with a re-write from Lee and Kevin Willmott, the over/under $40 million film is the filmmaker’s biggest-budgeted film since Inside Man ($50 million in 2006) and (in terms of inflation) Malcolm X ($35 million in 1992). It is closer in kin to the terrific bank heist thriller, again letting Lee play in the genre sandbox, complete with action and adventure where appropriate, while operating as a deeply personal and consistently opinionated melodrama. The core plot, an unapologetic riff on The Treasure of Sierra Madre by way of Apocalypse Now, finds four elderly vets venturing back to Vietnam to locate both the remains of their superior officer (Chadwick Boseman in a fiery extended cameo) and buried treasure that has remained hidden since the war, is merely a clothesline.
The core of the 158-minute epic is the conversations between its four leads (Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis and Isiah Whitlock Jr.) as they discuss the glorification of the Vietnam war through a white heroic lens (think Missing in Action and Rambo: First Blood Part II) and the irony of these soldiers being viewed with suspicion by the generation(s) left behind after the war even as they themselves came home to little in the way of social progress. How they find out about MLK’s murder is a grim highlight. That one of our protagonists is a confessed Donald Trump voter, complete with a “Make America great” hat, is treated not with scorn or mockery but with disgruntled sympathy.
