Da 5 Bloods (Spike Lee, 2020)

Accusing Spike Lee of making a mess is like calling Neil Tennant a bored wimp. Mess is his subject and his medium. So in this tale of four veterans who return to Vietnam to retrieve millions of dollars in buried gold, we get didacticism, varied aspect ratios and film stocks, myriad allusions to westerns and war films (Rambo and Missing in Action and The Treasure of Sierra Madre and Day of the Outlaw and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia), Marvin Gaye's isolated vocal track for "What's Going On?" and, somewhere in there, a tense-as-funk 155-minute genre film. The film's most conspicuous virtue is its uncontainable intellectual pride. And at the center of it all, Lee places the psychology of Paul (Delroy Lindo, stunning), a MAGA-hat-wearing black man denied an inner life by America. Da 5 Bloods gives him the room to exhale.

Grade: A-minus