“Da 5 Bloods” Movie Review

    It hasn’t been an easy few months for us film buffs thanks to the global pandemic which has sadly affected much of the world and has taken far too many lives.  Longing for the days of going to the theater seems a bit selfish and unrealistic at the moment.  Luckily, we can all enjoy a little bit of normalcy in the form of original streaming content.  While a great deal of the films that premiere on the streaming services are on the subpar side, occasionally acclaimed filmmakers decide to try their hands at more non-traditional filmmaking using Netflix or Hulu.  One such filmmaker with a film hitting Netflix recently was the controversial Spike Lee.

    The film focuses on four aging African Americans who return to Ho Chi Minh City for the first time since the Vietnam War.  The men were members of a unit of American soldiers self dubbed “the bloods” which was led by their now deceased squad leader Norman.  The men are searching for gold they left buried there during the war.  Unfortunately, the quest for the lost treasure ends up tearing the friends apart and the men may not make it out of Vietnam this time.

    With a predominately African American cast, this film has been released at an important time in modern politics with the Black Lives Matter movement becoming an increasingly powerful and moving voice in the United States.  It also illustrated the fact that the horrors of war knows no race.  War doesn’t discriminate and scars any race, religion, and side it touches.

    My father was a Vietnam veteran who suffered mildly from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and this film did a good job depicting the impact it has on some veterans.  Sadly, you can take the men out of the war but you can’t always take the war out of the men sometimes.  Spike Lee’s handling of PTSD was handled very well through the film in my opinion.

    The film wasn’t perfect despite some interesting concepts.  The editing is some scenes was bit rough and could have been handled a bit better especially during the battle scenes.  The score was also rather bland for a war film.

    While the cast of actors did a magnificent job in their roles, I wasn’t a fan of Lee using the same older actors in flashbacks.  I found this to be very distracting and I would have used younger actors to be younger versions of them.

    “Da 5 Bloods” is a film about how sometimes war never ends for some soldiers.  It is also a film which explores the brotherhood of a group of African American soldiers living through a war no American should have been involved with.

GRADE: B+