<em>Da 5 Bloods</em> Is the Most Ambitious Film Spike Lee Has Ever Made

Read: With ‘BlacKkKlansman,’ Spike Lee sounds the alarm about America’s past and present

Da 5 Bloods is a story about a buried past: It follows Vietnam War veterans Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) as they travel back to their old battleground to find the body of Norman, their fallen squad leader. Also in their sights is the pile of gold bricks interred with him—a CIA cache intended for bribing Vietnamese rebels that Norman’s unit found in the ’70s. The group’s journey is both a decades-later rescue mission and a treasure hunt. The men have an opportunity to heal the wounds of the past but also make millions. As with many tales of legendary fortune, the wealth at stake quickly exposes stark divisions among the heroes. Lee connects his movie to an earlier film that grappled with such ideas, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, even recycling its most famous line about “stinking badges.”

Still, Da 5 Bloods is not a work of gritty realism. As the four squad members venture into the jungle, Lee flashes back to their wartime experiences, having the same actors (all of whom are in their 50s and 60s) play the “young” version of their character without any glitzy de-aging technology or prosthetic makeup. Da 5 Bloods’ production value is very high—it must be one of the most expensive movies Lee has ever made—and this flashback gimmick is clearly not a cost-saving measure but a thematic one. It’s a way to dramatize the men’s memories and how they’ve romanticized them with age, imagining themselves still able to perform such acts of violent heroism.

Paul, in particular, has never let go of his high-octane past. He’s now an avowed Trump supporter, prone to spouting off about illegal immigration and bringing up his war service as a badge of honor. Lindo’s performance is the pulsing center of Da 5 Bloods, focusing an occasionally meandering story (the film runs 154 minutes long). A frequent collaborator of Lee’s, Lindo throws himself into Paul’s sublimated fury; the ex-soldier is driven by trauma and rage at the way he and his African American compatriots were vilified for their participation in Vietnam. While the other characters are on this mission out of nostalgia, greed, and regret, Paul almost seems out for revenge against an enemy that no longer exists (and perhaps never did).

Though Hollywood has churned out many Vietnam narratives over the past 50 years, very few have seriously dug into the experience of black servicemen in that war. The most widely seen is the Hughes brothers’ wildly underrated Dead Presidents, a searing but brutally bleak 1995 crime thriller that was largely about the difficulties black veterans faced after returning home from the front. But Da 5 Bloods has an even wider scope, trying to take in the entire sweep of American imperialism from Vietnam on, and confronting how black citizens sacrificed their lives for a country that didn’t care about them.