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Four war veterans return to south-east Asia to confront a ghost from their past in a shocking, incendiary blend of searing satire and action-movie drama
Spike Lee has shown up with an insurgent filmic uproar to match the uproar in the world. Da 5 Bloods is a paintball gun loaded with real bullets: a blast of satire and emotional agony about race and the American empire, the evergreen wound of Vietnam, African-American sacrifices on the field of battle, and the fact that black deaths matter.
It’s an outrageous action painting of a film, splattering moods, genres, ideas and archive clips all over the screen – with many a Brechtian-vaudeville alienation. It feels sometimes like an old-style war movie such as The Dirty Dozen but maybe Godard’s Le Petit Soldat, with playful riffs on Hollywood Vietnam standards and even John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The movie tricks you into thinking that it’s going to be a gentle, bittersweet picture about middle-aged guys with giant guts and prostates sadly coming to terms with their past, and the importance of letting go … and then it detonates a shock of fear and greed, which itself is always verging on action-movie melodrama and farce. It’s all so inventively bizarre that you could treat it simply as a black comedy, but in the final 15 minutes there is an amazing crescendo of emotion. Continue reading...