“It’s as plain as day, they didn’t have to kill the boy,” says a bystander in Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing. After Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) is choked to death by a white police officer, the looting and rioting and mourning start. It’s a grisly scene, and a prophetic one given the recent rioting over George Floyd’s murder. It’s also a confirmation of Spike’s overarching theme: The past is never really the past.
Lee has made more than two dozen movies since Do The Right Thing first screened at Cannes in 1989. Though all of his work is about racial injustice, it says something about the filmmaker’s consistency that every film feels fresh and alive, pulsing with rage, hunger, and Black Power.
With his new picture, the Vietnam epic Da 5 Bloods, Lee reflects on decades of oppression of Black people. The movie begins with a montage of archival footage from the 1960s, including images of war, protests, Malcom X, and Muhammad Ali’s sympathy for Vietcong soldiers (“They never called me nigger. They never lynched me. They don’t put dogs on me”). Also in the mix is Marvin Gaye, whose music plays as often as Creedence Clearwater Revival would in a Vietnam film about white soldiers.
Lee easily transitions from the opening montage to the present day, where four Vietnam veterans, who collectively refer to themselves as “Bloods,” gather in a Ho Chi Minh City hotel. Eddie (Norm Lewis) is treating his friends to a vacation, where they hope to find the remains of their squad leader and fifth blood, Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman). As they talk over drinks, each character gets fleshed out: Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) is the voice of reason, Otis (Clarke Peters) is too cool for school, and Paul (Delroy Lindo) suffers from serious PTSD. Eddie, meanwhile, isn’t as rich as he would appear to be.
Drawing from such influences as Michael Cimino’s Deer Hunter, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, and John Huston’s The Treasure of Sierra Madre, Lee positions his characters’ journey as an allegory on how past and present can collide in maddening ways.
As with much of Lee’s recent work, the director shows us how history repeats itself by placing old news clips over present-day events. Everything from ‘60s protests to the Mai Lai Massacre appear on screen, while flashbacks to the Bloods’ fighting in Vietnam come out of nowhere like an ambush, jolting audiences with bursts of violence.
The present-day Bloods nurse those wounds with jokes and drinks and laughter, but a sense of loss hangs over their vacation. “Norman was our King and our Malcom,” Paul admits as they search the jungle for his body. “He was our fearless leader.”
But the Bloods aren’t only here to pay respect to an old friend. They are also after a box of gold bars, which they believe is stashed near Norman’s body. Suddenly Paul’s son (Jonathan Majors) enters the picture, as does a group of landmine protesters and a French baddie (Jean Reno) who wants the gold for himself.
With a 156-minute run time, Da 5 Bloods covers a lot of ground. Maybe too much ground. Screenwriters Kevin Willmott and Danny Bilson have copied every headline from 1955 through today and pasted it into their script. There are too many conversations about opioids or Trump or past wars that have nothing to do with Lee’s greater message. And—despite the lush scenery, shot on location in Southeast Asia—the third act gets lost in a jungle crawling with action cliches, and worst of all, Paul’s PTSD descent into madness.
Still, even as his characters split up and meander, Lee’s condemnation of systemic racism comes through clearly. In a final montage, present-day images remind us that little has changed since the 1960s: Black mothers cry over coffins, fathers over lost friends, teens at protests hoping to be heard. It’s time America did the right thing and listened.
Da 5 Bloods is available to stream on Netflix beginning June 12.