It would certainly be easy to suggest that Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods is the “movie the world needs right now”. The director’s latest Joint, an old-timer buddy movie that reckons with the experiences of Black American Vietnam veterans, might share an unmistakable theme with recent events but, to restrict its resonance to the current political climate ” or worse, “the moment” ” does a disservice to its ambitious historical scope, which serves as a reminder that the systemic neglect of African Americans has been a stain on the national character for hundreds of years. At the film’s end, Lee (pictured, far left) includes a powerful tribute to the Black Lives Matter movement. ( Supplied: Netflix ) As the Bloods’ squad leader, the radical Stormin’ Norman’ (Chadwick Boseman), says to his soldiers at one point: “We been dyin’ for this country from the very git, hoping one day they’d give us our rightful place ” and all they gave us was a foot up our Black asses.” Lee’s nearly 40-year career across both feature film and documentary ” home to such major works as Do the Right Thing (1989), Malcolm X (1992), Bamboozled (2000), When the Levees Broke (2006), and BlacKkKlansman (2018) ” is an ongoing, vital discourse on Black culture and he knows as well as anyone the ways in which contemporary events are just history repeating itself. Delroy Lindo (right) previously starred in Spike Lee’s films Malcolm X, Crooklyn and Clockers. ( Supplied: Netflix/David Lee ) His recent short, 3 Brothers, connects footage of the police-inflicted deaths of Eric Garner and George Floyd to the murder of Do the Right Thing’s own Radio Raheem, whose choking at the hands of overzealous cops launched that film’s iconic trash-can through the store window ” a wake-up call that remains as relevant as ever, to put it mildly. The director’s new film may not have the explosive dynamism of his 1989 classic, but it’s no less impassioned. Lee and his BlacKkKlansman collaborator Kevin Willmott overhauled a previous script by writers Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo, which focused on a reunited group of white Vietnam veterans and was, at one point, set to be directed by Oliver Stone. Back in 1971, a patrol of Black soldiers goes down in a chopper crash in the Vietnamese jungle, where they chance upon a payload of gold bullion dropped by the US military in an attempt to fund local villagers in their fight against the Viet Cong. Stormin’ Norman (no doubt a cheeky swipe of Gulf War General Schwarzkopf’s famous nickname) decides it’s the perfect opportunity for the five brothers to claim some long-overdue reparations. “I say the USA owes us,” he declares. “We built this bitch.” A keen scholar of Black history, Norman invokes Crispus Attucks, a Black man who was the first person to die in the American Revolution. “We was the very first people to die for this red, white, and blue,” he says, and Lee follows suit, cutting to a historical portrait of Attucks ” among many others ” on screen during the action. Artist and designer Emory Douglas, one-time Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, created the film’s poster art. ( Supplied: Netflix ) Though mostly seen in Vietnam War flashbacks (which cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel renders in boxy, saturated frames that recall 16mm war footage), Norman’s presence haunts the film, and his pleas for radical action reverberate in Lee’s formal approach ” a characteristically nimble mix of historical media strategically woven into the movie’s fiction. Da 5 Bloods opens with no less than Muhammad Ali speaking out against the immorality of the Vietnam War, before swiftly moving, via Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On (1971), across a mini-history of the late-60s radical movement, starring such Black Power luminaries as Angela Davis, Bobby Seale, and Malcolm X. “The government has declared war on Black people,” says Malcolm X, as Lee shuttles through scenes of civil unrest and police brutality. Throughout Da 5 Bloods, North Vietnamese radio DJ Hanoi Hannah (Van Veronica Ngo) ” the film’s very own Mister Senor Love Daddy ” pops up to broadcast R&B hits and solidarity with the Black soldiers, reminding them that they make up a disproportionate 32 per cent of the US army’s cannon fodder (compared to 11 per cent of the national population back home.) These events are never far from the film’s present-day narrative, in which the squad’s four surviving members, now well into their 60s and sharing an easy, often comedic camaraderie, reconvene in Ho Chi Minh City on a mission to recover the gold they’d buried, Norman’s remains and ” just maybe ” some peace of mind from a war that has rattled around in their collective consciousness for decades. Lee enlisted the cast in a week-long bootcamp that included combat scenario training and handling of M16 rifles. ( Supplied: Netflix/David Lee ) There’s mission funder Eddie (Norm Lewis, from Lee’s TV series She’s Gotta Have It), Melvin (Isaiah Whitlock Jr, previously in Lee’s 25th Hour and BlacKkKlansman), Otis (Red Hook Summer), and Paul (Delroy Lindo, of Malcolm X and Crooklyn), the last to see Norman alive. Paul is a man whose mind has since been so bent out of shape that he’s taken to wearing a MAGA hat, albeit flipped to the back. “I see ghosts, every night,” he says. Accompanied by Paul’s estranged son, David (Lee newcomer Jonathan Majors), the Bloods make a deal with sketchy, beige-linen-clad gold trader Desroche (Jean Reno) ” one of several reminders of France’s colonial presence in the region ” and begin their boat journey upriver, with Lee goofing on Apocalypse Now and cranking Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries on the soundtrack. The nightclub scene in the film was shot at Apocalypse Now, a legendary bar in Ho Chi Minh City. ( Supplied: Netflix ) The film’s flashback episodes forgo the use of younger versions of the characters or Irishman-style de-aging by allowing the older actors to inhabit their youthful selves, effectively conveying a sense of events filtered through the perhaps-unreliable memory of the present (a later, Photoshopped snap of the younger men demonstrates just how disastrous any de-aging attempts would have been). Taken together, the alternating timelines give dimension to the pronounced dissonance experienced by Black soldiers who served their country only to be discarded by it, their journey into the jungle stalked by the ghosts of history at every turn (the disembodied, a cappella voice of Marvin Gaye shapes an especially eerie march toward a Buddhist temple.) The Vietnamese, too, merit Lee’s empathy, be it via gruesome, sometimes confronting historical images, or a tender subplot involving Otis’ former lover, Tien Luu (Le Y Lan); Muhammad Ali’s famous words ” “no Viet Cong ever called me nigger” ” always close to the film’s mind. As he did with BlacKkKlansman, Lee has welded a genre movie to audacious cultural dialogue and Da 5 Bloods works best when it’s firing in the filmmaker’s punchy, didactic register ” a distinct mode that showcases his undiminished power, five decades into his career. But the film is less successful the further it moves away from its sense of radical engagement. A generic action movie plot, presumably left over from the previous incarnation of the screenplay, pits the Bloods against a pursuing Vietnamese army patrol, and sequences involving an international team who work to defuse landmines ” played by Melanie Thierry, Jasper Paakkonen, and Paul Walter Hauser (back on bomb duty after Richard Jewell) ” threaten to muddy both the film’s tonal clarity and emotional impact. This was Lee’s first production in Asia, and was filmed in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. ( Supplied: Netflix ) It’s Lindo’s touching performance that anchors the film when it needs it most, teasing out the paradoxes of his character’s trauma. The veteran Lee collaborator, who portrayed a version of the director’s father in the autobiographical Crooklyn, gets to stretch out in an extended, sometimes to-camera monologue as he goes rogue in the jungle, bringing weight amid the less inspired double-crosses and jungle shootouts. Through him, Lee achieves a sense of historical reconciliation, restoring dignity to the squad and, by extension, the Black veterans themselves. There are few more resonant images in the film than that of Norman, astride a makeshift throne of palm leaves that suggests the majesty of an African king, a regal tableau as potent as any of Boseman’s moments in Marvel’s Black Panther. By the time Da 5 Bloods reaches its affecting conclusion, Lee has managed to convey both fury and hopefulness, condemning the lingering ravages of colonialism even as the film risks turning hokey ” as in the downward trajectory of Paul’s increasingly filthy MAGA cap, which passes through owners like a cursed talisman, or a scene that takes the Apocalypse Now riff one heart of darkness too far. Lee loves to bring events back to the present and here ” with pointed urgency ” one of the film’s final images finds the spoils of the mission benefitting a gathering of Black Lives Matter activists. Of course, the Netflix-funded film is also nestled neatly within the streaming giant’s newly-minted, some might say opportunistic, “Black Lives Matter” collection, where the end credits are inevitably cut short by the platform’s pernicious autoplay function ” less a call to radical action than a prompt to stay glued to the sofa and boost the service’s all-important metrics. Clearly, there’s still a long way to go. Loading YouTube content