Da 5 Bloods (2020)

Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods begins as a heist picture about aging veterans returning to Vietnam for buried CIA gold and ends as a sermon on the racial ledger of American empire. Lee and Kevin Willmott reworked a spec script into an all-Black ensemble piece, with Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr., and Norm Lewis carrying the weight. That choice is not decorative. It is the film's architecture. The movie has no LGBTQ subplot, no climate crusade, and no body-positivity detour. Its attention is elsewhere, fixed on the wound of race and the long afterlife of war.

Those wounds are the point. The Bloods were sent to fight for a country that oppressed them, and the buried gold becomes a crude but effective reparations metaphor. The critique of American imperialism and the economic exploitation of Black soldiers registers, though the film cares more about racial grievance than class warfare. Women mostly exist at the edges, serving the veterans' arcs. Paul's PTSD and paranoid rage dominate the screen, yet the film treats them as war trauma, not as a neurodivergence identity narrative. Lee also rewrites the Hollywood Vietnam canon, inserting Black veterans' history and closing with an explicit nod to Black Lives Matter. His lecture energy remains intact: direct-address monologues, archival montages, and a megaphone where a whisper might have fit.

The result is uneven, overlong, and frequently brilliant, which is the standard Spike Lee bargain. It is a film of high racial consciousness, robust representational intent, moderate historical revision, and very little interest in other contemporary pieties. The gold gets divided, the sermon gets delivered, and the audience is left to sort through the rubble. As a specimen of 2020s cultural production, it is potent, sincere, and impossible to mistake for subtle. The sommelier notes are bold, tannic, and lingering.