Film

Da 5 Bloods

Name: Da 5 Bloods
Genre: War, Drama
Released: 2020
Cast: Delroy Lindo, Jonathan Majors, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, Isiah Whitlock Jr.

Spike Lee's sprawling, furious war film sends four Black Vietnam vets back into the jungle for the bones of their squad leader and a stash of buried gold. Part heist, part elegy, part op-ed, it lurches from firefight tension to grief to political fury, sometimes within a single scene. For viewers who want entertainment loud, messy, and morally serious all at once.

TMDb rating

6.4

If you liked this

Apocalypse Now1979

The granddaddy of Vietnam war cinema, a hallucinatory descent upriver that Lee's film argues with as much as it borrows from; watch it to see the myth Da 5 Bloods is dismantling.

But It's long, willfully strange, and more interested in dread and myth than in the Black soldiers who actually fought.

Platoon1986

Oliver Stone's ground-level, blood-and-mud account of Vietnam combat, told by someone who was actually there — the visceral counterpart to Lee's more stylised approach.

But It's grim and unrelenting with little of Da 5 Bloods' humour or warmth between the men.

Three Kings1999

Soldiers chasing hidden gold in a war zone, wrestling with conscience along the way — the plot engine of Da 5 Bloods run through Gulf War satire and a restless, hyper-stylised camera.

But Its jokey, MTV-era energy is a world away from Lee's mournful, elegiac register.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Kelly's Heroes1970

Same bones — soldiers, buried gold, a mission that's really about greed — but staged as pure entertainment instead of elegy, showing how differently the same premise can be told.

A gang of GIs go behind enemy lines to steal a fortune in Nazi gold — the exact treasure-hunt-in-a-war-zone plot of Da 5 Bloods, played as a rollicking, wisecracking caper.

But It treats war as a playground for capers rather than trauma; anyone hoping for reckoning will find only fun.

The Deer Hunter1978

A devastating study of what Vietnam did to the men who came home, told through the fractured friendships of steelworkers from Pennsylvania.

But Nearly three hours of slow-burn tragedy with almost none of the adrenaline or humour Lee mixes in.

BlacKkKlansman2018

Lee at his angriest and funniest, splicing archive footage into a true-crime comedy about race in America — same director, same bruising tonal whiplash.

But It's set in the 1970s and deals with white supremacy rather than war, so the connective tissue is Lee's voice more than subject matter.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre1948

The original story of men undone by buried gold and the moral rot that greed brings out — Da 5 Bloods borrows its bones almost wholesale.

But Black-and-white, stagey by modern standards, and entirely uninterested in race or war trauma.

Full Metal Jacket1987

Kubrick's icy, two-part dissection of what basic training and combat do to a person, still one of the coldest and funniest war films ever made.

But Its detachment is the opposite of Lee's raw, first-person fury — you may miss the warmth.

Malcolm X1992

Denzel Washington's towering performance in Lee's other great historical epic about Black American identity, rage, and reinvention.

But It's a three-and-a-half-hour biopic with no war-movie mechanics — a completely different shape of film.

The Best Years of Our Lives1946

The quiet, devastating original story of veterans struggling to fit back into a country that's already moved on, made just after WWII ended.

But Gentle, dated, and entirely white — none of Lee's fury or formal daring.

Hearts and Minds1974

This is the historical anger Da 5 Bloods is dramatizing decades later; watching it is like seeing the wound Lee's film is still picking at.

A blistering, Oscar-winning documentary assembled while the Vietnam War was still happening, mixing combat footage with interviews that expose the war's moral bankruptcy in real time.

But No characters to hold onto, no plot — just raw archival fury that can feel relentless.

Waltz with Bashir2008

Like David piecing together his father's war and his own inheritance of it, this is about the unreliable, haunted memory soldiers carry home — just rendered in a completely different medium.

An Israeli filmmaker animates his own fractured memories of the 1982 Lebanon War, chasing down what he can't quite remember doing and seeing.

But Animated war memoir is a strange, slow register if you're expecting anything like an action film.