I quit on this one halfway through, which still means that I in­vested well over an hour.  I am not into surrealism, and the sur­realist tropes kept piling up: the family dinner at which everyone acts strange (as in, e.g., Buffalo ’66); the backstory that keeps changing (as in, e.g., Certified Copy); the odd passage of time so that years pass in a moment (as in, e.g., Synecdoche, New York) or run backward; the cut to a close-up and cut back to a wide shot that is now different; the character who turns out to be imaginary (Rule One is “You do not give an example of this”).  Each new departure from reality amplified my inclination to make my departure from the movie.

Danny Bilson, Paul De Meo, Kevin Willmott, and Spike Lee, 2020 #13, 2020 Skandies

On one level, this is a completely standard heist movie.  Four old friends have a reasonably good idea of where they can find a cache of gold bars.  Getting hold of that gold will be dangerous.  Even if they are able to get their hands on it, and fend off any rivals for it, they might not be able to trust the underworld contacts they’re relying on to fence the gold.  They might not be able to trust each other!  Hey, why is that guy hiding a gun?  Hey, doesn’t that other guy seem like he’s starting to go off the deep end?  Etc., etc. 

But this is also a Vietnam War movie.  The gold is a shipment from the U.S. government to South Vietnamese clients, but after a Vietcong attack that leaves our central characters as the sole surviviors, they elect to bury it and come back to collect it after the war.  Well, now it’s after the war.  Quite a bit after.  Because Da 5 Bloods is set in what was the present at the time of its release, with Trump in the White House and one of the main characters wearing a “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” hat for most of the running time.  This means that the title characters are at the very least pushing seventy and probably past it.  Which had me wondering what the point of this caper was.  They’re going to venture into a steaming jungle on the other side of the world, fending off snakes and knowing that one false step could mean setting off a land mine, at seventy, so that, what, they can afford to pay for a nursing home?  I can imagine this premise working in the ’90s, maybe: the Cold War is now over, so these guys can return to Vietnam, find the gold, and return home as forty-year-old millionaires (barely) who can raise their kids in upper-middle-class neighborhoods.  But more than fifty years after their first tour… I get their other goal, finding and repatri­ating the body of the fifth member of the old crew, because at their age it’s now or never… but a lot more of the movie is given over to a bunch of bickering over who has to split how much of a share with whom, and it feels like they’re arguing over who gets to take a seat on the subway when the train is one stop from the end of the line.  I guess maybe the idea is that now that they have less of their own lives to lose, they’re trying to retrieve the gold so they can pass along a tidy sum to the people and causes of their choice?  If so, that might be something to make clear before the epilogue.

But to a great extent any talk of logical motivations is missing the point, because on another level this is not a completely stan­dard movie; it’s a gonzo movie that feels like it was made by Quentin Tarantino’s older brother.  You’ve got tense conversa­tions that stretch on for minute after agonizing minute, and then suddenly everything’s going boom or half the cast is being held at gunpoint or both.  The aspect ratio changes from one moment to the next: letterboxed in the city, 16×9 in the jungle, 4×3 in flashback, with different film stock used (or at least simulated).  As for those flashbacks⁠—the gimmick is that the movie uses the same actors for 1968 as for 2019, so you’ve got a bunch of gray­beards standing in for their teenage selves, with the exception of the one who died during the war, who for some reason is played by a fortysomething.  So realism is not on the menu.  What is on the menu is a set of lessons about the history of African-Ameri­can participation in Vietnam, which will probably be what I re­member about this movie.  After all, while there are parallels between Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino, in other ways they are as different as Morehouse College and Video Archives.

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