Gentlemen, welcome back to Vietnam.

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's Top 50 Movies of 2020...

#14 : Da 5 Bloods

Spike Lee’s lacerating Vietnam war movie, about a squad of African American soldiers who return to the battlefield decades later to remember their dead leader (played by Chadwick Boseman) as well as hunting treasure.

Spike Lee is one of those film-makers I'm not as aware of as I should be, but there are a few of his films I've started and just found to be a bit too earnest - he's obviously got a lot to say and I suspect I would agree with most of it (from a position of limited experience), but it just feels too much like hard work to keep up with him.  However, I have no choice but to stick with him here for 2 hours and 35 minutes - I'm not sure I'm going to manage it in one sitting somehow.

And we start off with a bit of a historical montage, which suggests my fears are going to be somewhat confirmed.  Although it was nice to see Angela Davis (with a most magnificent afro) featuring - we saw both her historical and present-day versions very recently in this film.  Veering off on a slight tangent, we also get to see footage of the Democratic Party nomination in Chicago and Bobby Seale - both of which feature in The Trial Of The Chicago 7, which is a film from 2020 which I'm very much surprised not to see on The Guardian's list (and it's well worth checking out if you haven't seen it).

Right - let's start the film proper then.  Four guys are travelling back to Vietnam in order to track down the remains of "Stormin Norman" their former leader.  However, the first (I suspect of quite a few) flashbacks takes us back to a fire-fight which suggests that a big box of gold bars might possibly provide an ulterior motive.  And so we follow them (and one of their sons), both in the past and the present day as they navigate their way "up country".  They're an engaging bunch - obviously with issues but with varying degrees of awareness as to said issues.  And, at times, these issues cause further issues - although at times they are introduced a bit too conveniently for the story, but I guess we need a story now, don't we?

I was surprised that the current day action got quite as violent as it did - I don't know why this was the case because I knew things would head South pretty quickly, but I wasn't expecting it to go quite the way it did.  If the truth be told, it goes a bit batshit crazy at times - but in an entertaining enough fashion.  Quite Tarantino-esque in ways.  It's also a bit talky at times but that's probably to be expected from the boy Spike - although I'd say he's less annoying in his dialogue that Mr Tarantino can be (and I love a lot of Quentin's dialogue, but for me he just doesn't know when to stop at times)

There are also the most unbelievable circumstances - particularly around the initial discovery of the treasure, which resulted in a great deal of eye-rolling on my part.  Don't worry, the fact that they find some treasure is not a massive spoiler - the film would have been a very long slog without some treasure turning up.  But in the end it manages to wrap things up in a neat enough way that I just about managed to forgive it.

The acting is generally pretty good.  Delroy Lindo (who once acted in a film set in a house that backed onto ours which needed some daytime shots filmed at night so we had some interesting evenings with our garden lit by HUGE spotlights) plays an interesting character who has whole plates of chips on both shoulders.  And he plays it well - he's believably frustrated and fucked-up.  Clarke Peters is the other one of the four that stands out for me - he's given more to do than the others but he handles it well (as he always does).  The other actor that needs to be mentioned is Chadwick Boseman - reliable as always, but painfully thin (required for the role, but sadly probably easily achieved for him at the time).

Spike makes an interesting stylistic choice in flashback to not de-age the four main characters - if I was being harsh I say that was the cheaper option, but it also suggested that it was more their recollection of the time and hence possibly an unreliable narration - because there's certainly some unreliable narrators around.  We are also presented with interesting snippets of history along the way - there was a risk it could have felt a bit like a lecture but I think it was used sparingly enough that they got away with it.

It's generally a well shot film and very interesting scenery both in the cities and out in the country - I've always thought I'd quite like Vietnam and nothing in this film has convinced me otherwise.  However, some of the shots are mostly definitely intended to evoke Apocalypse Now - and the use of "Ride Of The Valkyries" was hardly accidental now, was it?  And there's an appearance of a mysterious French woman as well.

One final minor gripe - I suspect that just hiking in Vietnamese heat is hard work, let alone getting up to half the shenanigans they do when they're not in the finest of physical shapes.  And they're also loaded down with backpacks that no mere mortal would actually be able to lift if the normal laws of physics were applied.

And one fun fact from IMDB - da 5 (present day) bloods are Paul, Melvin, Otis, Eddie and David - which are the first names of The Temptations.  And their leader was called Norman, referencing Norman Whitfield who produced a lot of their Motown hits.

So, to sum up it feels to be a worthy attempt at a film, but with my cultural background I'm not really able to say how much it hits home - despite Spike's best efforts to educate me.  Having said that, if I claimed to be an expert because I'd watched one of his films, he'd be the first person to have a go at me.  So really for me, I was left with taking the acting, script, story and action on face value - and it was all generally fine and a pleasant enough way to spend 2.5 hours (which was obviously far longer than it needed to be).  I didn't manage it in the one sitting, but that was more a logistical problem than anything to do with the film.

But did I enjoy it?  Well - not really, to be honest.  It just didn't really click for me and was, at times, extremely silly.  Sorry Spike!  I'm also not sure quite who I feel it's aimed at other than black Americans, so I'd struggle to recommend it to anyone - if you fancy it, then give it a go but if you think it's not for you, then I suspect you're right.

At the time of writing, the film is available to watch on Netflix only - because it's a Netflix film.  So it ain't going anywhere else, I'm afraid!

#15 - Another interesting woman
#13 - A lot of similarities with the previous film