Netflix Movie: Da 5 Bloods

Spike Lee is nothing if not provocative.  He uses Black GIs' participation in the Vietnam war as the backdrop for a meditation on current race relations.

The premise is rather shaky -- 5 GIs find a chest of CIA gold and bury it during the war, returning 45 years later to dig it up, clandestinely.  

The movie proceeds in a series of flashbacks.  Rather than use younger actors for the 1970s scenes, Lee simply uses the same old actors without apology.

Some of the setups are unbelievably amateurish. Maybe he had no budget.

Eh, the age of the actors isn't the only anachronism.  The GIs encounter some children born during the war -- one fathered by one of them -- and they're in their twenties or at most early thirties.  Yet one of the GIs wears a MAGA hat and admits to having voted for Trump, so the movie isn't set in the 1990s.

The GIs are in the fifties, instead of their seventies.  There's twenty years missing in everything!

It was a weird mishmash of Black history, Vietnam history, Indiana Jones, preachy polemics (Spike Lee's trademark), Black empowerment, US government mistreatment of African-American soldiers, and wildly unlikely storytelling.  Lots of questionable production decisions -- one of the few GOOD decisions is that anytime somebody gets shot in the movie, a squib of blood gives good splatter..  You rarely see that.  

I give it a C overall.