George Floyd was alive when Spike Lee began filming Da 5 Bloods, an ambitious film about four black war veterans who call themselves the Bloods, hunting for the remains of the fifth Blood—their prophet-like platoon leader “Storming” Norman, killed in action in Vietnam.
The evening Floyd walked into a grocery store in Minneapolis to buy cigarettes, Lee was at home, readying the film for release on Netflix. It was Memorial Day, a public holiday in the US for honouring and mourning military personnel who had died while serving.
In Lee’s film, the Bloods go into a Vietnam that has drastically changed. “Wow, look at all this!” exclaims one of them as a young Vietnamese guide leads them through a crowded market square surrounded by high-rises and burger outlets. “They didn’t need us. They should’ve just sent Mickey Ds, Pizza Hut and The Colonel, and we would have defeated the Viet Cong in one week!”
Floyd, too, could have found himself in a place that was both familiar and strange. The owner of the grocery store, a 35-year-old Palestinian American called Mahmoud Abumayyaleh, knew Floyd as the “big teddy bear” who would drop in occasionally to pay phone bills. That evening, because it was Memorial Day, Abumayyaleh was away and Floyd had to deal with one of his young, inexperienced attendants.
In Da 5 Bloods, the motives of the veterans are not entirely honourable. Their reverence for their fallen leader is not the only factor that prompts them to return to Vietnam; they also want to recover a pile of gold bricks that was buried with him. The gold was the US government’s bribe to the native people for their help in fighting the Viet Cong. The Bloods get hold of it during the war and bury it. “If they ask, we say the VC got it,” Storming Norman tells the Bloods shortly before he dies. “Later on, we come back and collect.”
Floyd’s intentions, too, much like the Bloods’s, may have been less than honourable. He was inebriated, and he allegedly bought cigarettes with a fake $20 note, the ink on which was reportedly still drying. To the shop assistant, Abumayyaleh’s teddy bear looked threateningly big enough to call the cops.
In the film, one of the Bloods, Paul, deserts his friends after obtaining his share of gold bricks. “You made me malignant,” he says. As he escapes with the lucre, Paul looks down the camera, at the audience, and delivers a long monologue. The war, he says, polluted “my bloodstream, my cells, my DNA and my... soul”. “But I ain’t dying from that shit,” he says defiantly. “You hear me: You will not kill Paul. The US government will not take me out. I will choose when and how I die!”
Paul, it turns out, meets a fate that is not very different from Floyd’s. And both the deaths lead to violent confrontations. “Bloods don’t die; we just multiply,” goes one prophetic line, early in the film.
Spike Lee’s films are usually dense, topical and resonant, but never has he directed a film as eerily fitting and grandiloquent as Da 5 Bloods. Watching the film is quite like feeling the reel and the real converging and collapsing. It is never a comfortable watch.
The topicality can also be off-putting at times. There are indeed powerfully subversive moments (in a nod to Apocalypse Now, Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries blares as the Bloods set off on a boat to the jungle) and thematic stresses (Paul is a Trump supporter who wears a MAGA cap that ends up being worn by a murdering Frenchman). But, all these elements never quite come together to make a great film. Like most Spike Lee movies, Da 5 Bloods is less than the sum of its parts.
But then, Lee is not a filmmaker in the conventional sense of the word. Each of his movies (except the horrible Oldboy) is labelled as “a Spike Lee joint”. That is how he ‘signs’ his movies. A Spike Lee joint, he once explained, was “really all the ingredients that I put into my film. Whatever film it is, whatever subject matter is. The connective tissue is that it’s coming through me.”
Da 5 Bloods is as messy and unsophisticated as anything Lee has rolled in film. But he may well want you to savour and experience it in parts, rather than devour and understand it in whole.
Da 5 Bloods
Available on Netflix
Rating: 3/5