If you Google “best Vietnam war movies,” the posters show a lot of tired and angry white faces looking back at you. There’s Christian Bale in Rescue Dawn . Mel Gibson in We Were Soldiers . Willem Dafoe in Platoon . Tom Cruise in Born on the Fourth of July . Robert De Niro in The Deer Hunter . Sean Penn and Michael J. Fox in Casualties of War . And on back to John Wayne in The Green Berets .
The picture in country was rather different. Beginning in 1965, a surge in the draft resulted in a quarter million new U.S. soldiers. Forty-one percent were black, compared to just 11% of the U.S. population. After the war, blacks were twice as likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Enter Spike Lee, whose last feature, 2018’s BlacKkKlansman , won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay and was arguably robbed of another for best picture by the much safer race-relations movie Green Book . He also directed 2008’s Miracle at St. Anna , a Second World War movie that opens with a black veteran watching Wayne in The Longest Day and talking back to the TV: “Pilgrim, we fought for this country too.”
So on the one hand Lee’s Vietnam War flick Da 5 Bloods represents a way of redressing an imbalance in the narrative of that conflict. (1995 saw a couple of other examples: the Vietnam vet crime drama Dead Presidents from the Hughes Brothers, and Preston A. Whitmore II’s The Walking Dead , about a POW rescue mission.)
Musical choices that include a haunting, a cappella version of Marvin Gaye’s anti-war ballad What's Going On
But it would be a mistake to look at this film as merely a didactic screed. Da 5 Bloods is on its surface an entertaining action movie, about a quartet of veterans – Delroy Lindo as Paul; Isiah Whitlock Jr. as Melvin; Clarke Peters as Otis; and Norm Lewis as Eddie – who return to Saigon to find the remains of their fallen commander, and also to recover a huge trunk full of gold, found and buried when they were last there in 1971. They’re joined by David (Jonathan Majors), Paul’s adult son.
The film began with a 2013 screenplay by Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo, called The Last Tour , which was almost shot by Oliver Stone. When that fell through, Lee got hold of it and did a rewrite with BlacKkKlansman co-writer Kevin Willmott, in the process flipping the characters’ race.
So it’s a guarantee that in the original screenplay the soldiers don’t hear about the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. while on patrol, and they don’t have to be talked down by their commander (Chadwick Boseman) from using their weapons to exact revenge on their white brothers-in-arms. It’s also a safe bet that no one references that messianic leader as: “He was our Malcolm and our Martin.” But the movie is richer for all of this.
Lee makes some great choices in shooting this story. Scenes during the war are shot in narrow, grainy footage, replicating the look of 16 mm film, which is how many people back home saw the war on their television sets. When the action changes to the present day the screen goes wide, the picture sharp.
But what doesn’t change is the actors playing the four soldiers. Though all are in their fifties and sixties, they do double duty as their younger selves, without the benefit of makeup, digital de-aging or look-alike younger actors.
It’s a risky move, but it works on a number of levels. For one thing, we don’t have to remember who’s who in the flashbacks, which was a big problem with last year’s The Last Full Measure . Metaphorically, it suggests that they are stuck in the past. (At least one of the four has PTSD, while another is addicted to painkillers.) And special effects are not Da 5 Bloods ’ strong suit; one scene of a land-mine victim looks particularly unconvincing.
Regardless, the story is solid and compelling. The veterans arrive in a Saigon unrecognizable from the one they left decades earlier – one of them looks at all the fast-food joints and remarks that all they needed to do was let Colonel Sanders fight the war for them. After a night at the Apocalypse Now bar – a real place, by the way – they set off upriver with their guide Vinh (Johnny Tri Nguyen) as the soundtrack obliges with Ride of the Valkyries.
It’s a classic men-on-a-mission narrative, enlivened with surprises in both casting – Jean Reno plays a French mercenary who’s going to help them get the gold out of the country – and in character development, as when we learn early on that Paul is a MAGA-hat-wearing Trump supporter who seems to have signed up for the president’s anti-immigrant platform. And you can hear Lee needling the right wing when Paul, accused of being a baby-killer, responds with: “There were atrocities on both sides.”
The film is beautifully shot – it’s a shame it had to skip a planned premiere at the Cannes film festival this year, where Lee was also supposed to be heading up the jury. And it’s equally wonderful to listen to, with a powerful, sweeping score by Lee regular Terence Blanchard, and musical choices that include a haunting, a cappella version of Marvin Gaye’s anti-war ballad What’s Going On .
Lee clearly has an agenda, and one that dovetails nicely with the anti-racism protests taking place around the globe right now. But he also knows how to craft quality entertainment. So come for the black history and stay for the story, or vice-versa. Either way, it’s an incredible odyssey.
Da 5 Bloods is available June 12 on Netflix.
4 stars out of 5
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2020
