Messy but absolutely necessary: Da 5 Bloods reviewed

Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods is about four African-American vets who return to Vietnam to locate the body of their fallen squadron leader, retrieve the gold they buried (hopefully), reflect on fighting for a country that didn’t care about them — ‘we fought an immoral war for rights we didn’t have’ — and avoid descending into madness and despair (also, hopefully). Lee and his co-writers have said they were inspired by the classic films The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Apocalypse Now and Bridge on the River Kwai and this does feel like several films in one. Oh, we’re in that film now, you may think to yourself. But even when Lee is all over the place he’s more interesting than many other filmmakers, and this is certainly of the moment. There have been war films with black soldiers in Vietnam before but it’s never been their story. This time round, it is.

The film, which was made for Netflix, opens with a montage of archival footage, set to Marvin Gaye, detailing the horrors of the Vietnam war and the civil rights unrest in America at that time. We then switch to the present day and our four men are reunited in a hotel in Ho Chi Minh City. They are Otis (Clarke Peters), Paul (Delroy Lindo), Eddie (Norm Lewis) and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock). They are da 4 bloods and da 5th blood was their leader, Norman (Chadwick Boseman), whose body they have come to find, and whom we see in flashbacks. (During the flashbacks, the four main actors have not been de-aged, which is confusing at first, but you will get over it and it does make sense that Norman has stayed for ever young.)