I don’t have any use for Spike Lee’s politics, but I have liked some of his movies. She’s Gotta Have It, for instance, his first one, which was a comedy.
Da 5 Bloods, however, a drama of a return to Vietnam by four black combat veterans now in their sixties, pretty much left me cold. Not just because of the politics (the one Trump supporter is PTSD crazy and gets it in the end, presumably for his sin of voting the wrong way) but by the way the veterans on their return to the country decades after the conflict ended keep attracting angry Vietnamese who lost kin in the American war. Including at My Lai. What are the odds? Pretty high if you’ve got to bash America to keep your bona fides with your leftist Hollywood pals.
Strange anomalies abound: an infantry officer’s uniform supposedly standing in for their dead squad leader’s, who would have been an E-5 at best. Probably Lee didn’t care to get it right. Any old uniform would do for the immoral war. And the sound track. Ride of the Valkyries? It crescendos when there is gunfire, both in the past and the present. Cheap, I guess, being public domain.
None of the four actors are Denzel Washington handsome so it’s a little disconcerting when one meets his old Vietnamese lover (who hasn’t aged much) and discovers THEIR beautiful daughter.
Of course they went back to find the squad leader’s remains, which they do almost too easily—and millions of dollars in buried gold bars, which it seems every Vietnamese wants a piece of. Hence the gun battles to satisfy the Hollywood soul. They may be against guns for the rest of us but they never miss a chance to use one or more in their movies.
And Lee has to politic it up, race-wise, mainly by claiming blacks were disproportionately in combat as opposed to whites. You can take that claim however you like it. You certainly can Google some statistics to back it up, whether they’re true or not. But Lee doesn’t really seem interested in truth, in Da 5 Bloods.
After all the riots and looting led by anti-Jewish Black Lives Matter over felon armed robber George Floyd, Lee’ll probably win an Oscar. And laugh all the way to the bank.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 