DA 5 BLOODS (2020)

Francis Ford Coppola went to Vietnam and found a Heart of Darkness.  Spike Lee goes to Vietnam and finds The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.  That’s the gobsmacking idea behind this shockingly self-indulgent, over-praised, woefully inadequate tall, tall tale about the four surviving ‘Bloods,’ Black infantry vets who return to ‘Nam for love and money.  Love in the form of the remains of the fifth ‘Blood’ (Chadwick Boseman), the noblest soldier of them all, left behind where he died.*  Money in the form of a chest of gold discovered on their downed helicopter which they buried near their comrade-in-arms.  With glances at many a previous Vietnam film, as well as THREE KINGS (with which it shares a cinematographer), BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE*, the afore mentioned SIERRA MADRE and more!  The film so overloaded with fanciful plot reverses, bloody gun battles and award-lusting acting turns, it sinks under its own weight an hour & a half before it expires.  (Like the men with their backpacks full of gold bricks.)  You start looking forward to one of Lee's signature didactic sidebar pauses just to break things up, a racially charged injustice factoid (relevant or not) or an archival clip to relieve the narrative onslaught of this testosterone addled shaggy dog story.  Enough Black filmmakers are around now so we no longer call someone, as Lee was called after SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT, the Black Woody Allen, or after CLOCKERS, the Black Martin Scorsese.  But when a film is propped up with so many this-is-important signifiers of historical gravitas, he just might be the Black Stanley Kramer.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: And even when Lee does stage an effective moment, it’s undercut by Terrence Blanchard’s weirdly inappropriate mournful music soundtrack.  ALSO: What’s with all the shape-shifting screen ratios?  The bulk of present day scenes shot standard ‘flat’ (1.85 : 1); flashbacks in squarish Academy Ration (1.33 : 1).  Why the occasional shots in 2.35 : 1?

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Make that Survivors +1 as there’s a son with Dad issues tagging along.  He’s really there to dance an Irish Jig upon finding the gold, just like Walter Huston did in his son’s pic,  John Huston’s TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *The reference really less John Ford/LIBERTY VALANCE then Bernardo Bertolucci/THE SPIDER’S STRATAGEM/’72.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/06/strategia-del-ragno-spiders-stratagem.html