DA 5 BLOODS (2020)

Four ageing African American veterans of the Viet Nam war return to the country, ostensible to find and repatriate the remains of their beloved squad leader (the fifth Blood) and also to retrieve a cache of gold bars they found and buried during a wartime patrol. Director Spike Lee kluges together flashbacks of 50-year-old battle scenes with the same actors, no attempt to de-age them; newsreels of the civil rights era and MLK's assassination; a love plot with one of the Bloods and a half-century-later mistress (and daughter from the relationship); betrayal; land mines blowing up; Paul (Delroy Lindo) cracking up, plus about a thousand MF-bombs. Lee clumsily tries to deliver several important messages at once, including PTSD, unfulfilled racial promises; police brutality--to say nothing of ripping off Apocalypse Now ("Ride of the Valkuries") playing while the Bloods boat upriver to their site) and Treasure of the Sierra Madre (leader of a group of Vietnamese bushwhackers telling them, "I don't gotta show you no stinkin' credentials"). What a mess!