2020 / 154m - USA
War, Action
1.5*/5.0*
Da 5 Bloods poster

Watches

June 17, 2020

1.5*/5.0*

Spike Lee must've had a clear vision when he started this project, but I dearly hope it wasn't anything close to this devastating mess. Da 5 Bloods feels like a film that wanted to say a lot of important things, but ultimately it comes off as a very bad pastiche. Not once does Lee find the right tone for his film.

With four black veterans returning to Vietnam to honor their fallen friend, the film has a perfect setup to revisit the Vietnam War and tell it from a black perspective. Throw in some gold hunting plot for a little adventure and suspense, and you have all the ingredients for a great film. Why then did it feel like a bad comedy, something that holds the middle between a bad Apocalypse Now rip-off and a subpar jungle-set JCVD action flick.

Performances are poor, the action scenes are drab, the dramatic moments are laughable and the political inserts are completely overshadowed by the incompetence surrounding them. The entire film is such a big mess that it is actually quite amusing to watch (at least to see where it is going), but in the end if feels like Lee overreached tremendously and couldn't stop himself from falling flat on his face. This wasn't any good.