Four stars. Rated R, for strong violence, grisly images and relentless profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.26.20
Movie serendipity can be spooky at times.
Back in the spring of 1979, The China Syndrome hit theaters just 12 days prior to Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island almost-a-catastrophe.
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| Sheer chance has brought them to the right spot: As David (Jonathan Majors, far right) watches quietly, his companions — from left, Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), Eddie (Norm Lewis), Paul (Delroy Lindo) and Otis (Clarke Peters) — find evidence of their long-ago fallen comrade. |
And now, director Spike Lee’s savagely compelling new drama, Da 5 Bloods, debuted on Netflix June 12, not quite three weeks after the callous murder of George Floyd ignited a justifiably enraged movement that shows no sign of slowing. Lee’s message couldn’t be more timely.
His film warrants such enhanced attention. And then some.
Da 5 Bloods — co-scripted by Lee, Danny Bilson, Paul De Meo and Kevin Willmott — finds the reliably passionate filmmaker once again in the infuriated mode that characterized his early career. This isn’t a slyly sarcastic (and fact-based) jab at racist buffoons akin to 2018’s BlacKkKlansman; Da 5 Bloods is a bleak, intensely angry rage-against-the-man diatribe, with a slice of magic realism.
And, yes, a few winks and nods to classic Hollywood. Let’s call it a Vietnam parable by way of 1948’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
The setting and character dynamics may be different, but the message is identical: Greed destroys.
African-American Vietnam veterans Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis) and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) haven’t been too successful, since returning to the world. They’re broken men, beaten down by grief, illness, addiction, financial ruin and divorce. And by regret and shame, knowing that — decades earlier — they were forced to abandon their fallen squad leader, known as Stormin’ Norman.
Haunted ever since by this failure (“Leave no man behind!”), they’ve returned to Vietnam, determined to find, and bring home, their former comrade’s remains.
As it happens, though, their motives aren’t entirely pure. Back in the day — shortly before Norman’s death — the squad was tasked by the CIA to deliver a chest of gold bars to the indigenous Vietnamese who were helping the American war effort. But Norman — passionate about his own people, back home — proposed they bury the gold until they could later reclaim it for the benefit of their own communities.
