Spike Lee takes black America back to ’nam; Nordic noir at its brightest; and a British avant-period drama

DA 5 BLOODS There could hardly be a more signi.cant moment for a new Spike Lee joint. As the killing of George Floyd leaves America in turmoil, Lee’s Netflix release Da 5 Bloods looks back at the Vietnam war and asks what it meant for black America.

Da 5 Bloods: (l-r) Isiah Whitlock Jr, Norm Lewis, Clarke Peters, Delroy Lindo, Jonathan Majors

Movies about the war have tended to cast African-American soldiers as onlookers to the tragedies of white heroes, whether it’s Laurence Fishburne’s character in Apocalypse Now! or Forest Whitaker in Platoon. Da 5 Bloods corrects that tendency, and offers a critical commentary on it, in its story of four black veterans who return to Vietnam today on a personal mission - locate a cache of gold bullion and bring back the body of Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman), their heroic and idealistic platoon leader. One man in particular, Paul (Delroy Lindo), is haunted by visions of the past and of Norman. He’s the most complex character - embittered, damaged and politically conflicted, heading out on his mission, and towards breakdown, in a MAGA cap.

The film starts dazzlingly as the men rediscover a changed Vietnam, with Newton Thomas Sigel’s photography blazing with neon colour. Throughout, Lee uses his characteristic formal invention - switching colours, textures and aspect ratio for the battle fashbacks and liberally inserting archive footage (including speeches by Malcom X, Angela Davis and others) plus images and captions, by way of visual footnotes.

Da 5 Bloods starts out with formidable purpose and promise but loses momentum as it becomes a somewhat messily executed, over-extended adventure yarn involving Vietnamese officers, a land mine expert (Mélanie Thierry) and a sinister white-suited fixer (Jean Reno). All this obscures what is most compelling about the heroes and their relationships; in fact, two of the quartet (Norm Lewis, Isiah Whitlock Jr) are under-developed as characters, while Lee over-indulges Lindo’s increasingly hothouse performance. In contrast, while there’s not that much Boseman, his charismatically intense moments bring the movie to life, while as the careworn Otis, Clarke Peters gives an impeccably nuanced performance. Soundtracked to Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On and a distractingly florid Terence Blanchard score, Da 5 Bloods is one of Lee’s most ambitious yet, but it lacks the bite and provocation of 2018’s BlacKkKlansman. Still, it undeniably rewrites the rules for Vietnam war movies, and it’s just as undeniably an essential watch.