5 Bloods

I liked the Spike Lee flourishes in this movie, as I do with all of Lee's movies. But the plot of Da 5 Bloods is a kind of Deliverance picture that questions masculinity... up to a point. The whole thing is just too plot heavy, and it completely unravels by the end of act two. It's also long, and at the end of act two I was stunned to realize we had another 40 minutes to go.

Delroy Lindo is excellent in this movie, but to my mind the action-film aspect (by which I mean an overabundance of plot) takes over Da 5 Bloods by its last act, and this not only seemed to cancel out the work that was done in the first two acts, it negated the emotional payoff of its own ending. A firefight is an exciting way to end a movie, sure, but it makes the movie about that.

Da 5 Bloods' politics are interesting, to be sure, but it is a puzzling – and slightly questionable – move to set a movie about reparations in Vietnam. When a bunch of Vietnamese guys show up at the end of the movie to claim all of the gold (as any reasonable person who has ever seen a movie might expect to happen), Da 5 Bloods introduces the question of precisely who deserves reparations. For this script, unfortunately (at least to my mind), the answer to that question is whoever has the bigger guns.

Da 5 Bloods is on Netflix.