JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Nearly everything I know about Black American History, I learned from Spike Lee movies. They are compelling and vivid, funny and furious, and they are an education. He will interrupt the flow of his own movie to have a character address the audience directly and deliver a lecture about some point of African-American life that we need to know. Reality is more important to him than the movie. In the end the movies merge with the real world: the undercover cop in BlacKkKlansman steps into a present where a sitting president empowers racism and murder. Da 5 Bloods is even more emotionally charged than other Spike Lee movies because Chadwick Boseman is in it, and the moment he appears onscreen his character is already a myth.

Spike Lee is an angry man, but he is fair. We understand Danny Aiello’s pizzeria owner in Do The Right Thing, we understand Edward Norton’s drug dealer in The 25th Hour, and here we almost understand Delroy Lindo’s Trump-voting, MAGA cap-wearing, PTSD-suffering Vietnam veteran. In a towering performance, Lindo pulls us into the rage and resentment of a man who feels that he has been cheated by life and will lash out even if he hurts himself. (Fans of The Wire will enjoy the reunion of Clarke Peters and Isiah Whitlock, Jr, who got one of his trademark Sheee-its in there.)

Da 5 Bloods is The Treasure of the Sierra Madre as a Vietnam war picture. Five men go into the jungle to retrieve the body of their fallen leader and a stash of gold bars they view as reparations—they were conscripted into someone else’s war to kill and die for rights they themselves did not have. I do not know if it was the filmmaker’s intention or budgetary constraints that led to the flashbacks in which Chadwick Boseman (the joy and pain of seeing him, especially now that we know what he was going through during filming) is young and heroic while his squad is old and grizzled (no digital de-aging), but it drives home the movie’s point: Wars never end. Those men are still fighting to this day.