Spike Lee is a filmmaker to be reckoned with, and Da 5 Bloods looks like a reckoning.
As the follow-up to Lee’s Academy Award-winning BlacKkKlansman, Da 5 Bloods is the fictional tale of four African-American veterans who return to Vietnam to gather the remains of their platoon leader. The slain commander’s son joins them.
Along with confronting the trauma of their tour, the group also seeks to dig up and take back some buried treasure they left behind: a case of gold bars. You could almost call this The Deer Hunter meets The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Delroy Lindo leads the cast that includes Clarke Peters and Isiah Whitlock Jr. (both from HBO’s The Wire), modern-day Broadway legend Norm Lewis, and up-and-coming actor Jonathan Majors (The Last Black Man in San Francisco) as the soldier’s son.
Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman plays the fallen squadron leader in flashbacks (ones that appear to be shot on 16 MM film). Paul Walter Hauser (Richard Jewell) and Jean Reno (Mission: Impossible) also co-star.
Between the straight-to-Netflix debut and our current multiplex shutdown, it’s unlikely we’ll ever get a chance to see this on a big screen in a proper theater, which is really unfortunate. If conditions allow, I hope that local indie theaters book some screenings sometime this fall.
We won’t have to wait that long for the actual movie, however. Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods premieres June 12, 2020 on Netflix.
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