DA 5 BLOODS (US - 2020) Directed by Spike Lee. Written by Danny Bilson, Paul DeMeo, Kevin Willmott and Spike Lee. Cast: Delroy Lindo, Jonathan Majors, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, Isiah Whitlock Jr, Chadwick Boseman, Jean Reno, Melanie Thierry, Paul Walter Hauser, Jasper Paakkonen, Johnny Tri Nguyen, Le Y Lan, Nguyen Ngoc Lam, Sandy Huong Pham, Van Veronica Ngo. (R, 155 mins) His 2018 film BLACKkKLANSMAN reflected a still-open wound with its release timed to the one-year anniversary of the Charlottesville tragedy, but DA 5 BLOODS finds Spike Lee making a film boiling with such rage over systemic racism that it could've been shot in the last two weeks. Of course, that systemic racism is there and always has been, but no film in recent memory has felt more "of the moment" than this, a sprawling and ambitious epic that does, on a few occasions, get too uneven and too unwieldy for its good. Lee and BLACKkKLANSMAN co-writer Kevin Willmott extensively reworked an existing script called THE LAST TOUR, written in 2013 by the team of Danny Bilson and Paul DeMeo, who got their start in the '80s writing cult sci-fi B movies like TRANCERS and ELIMINATORS for Charles Band's Empire Pictures. They soon moved up to THE ROCKETEER for Disney and into TV with the CBS series THE FLASH (DA 5 BLOODS also marks the final writing credit for DeMeo, who died in 2018 and gets a special acknowledgement in the end credits). Bilson and DeMeo have always had an affinity for men-on-a-mission wartime scenarios, from 1986's ZONE TROOPERS all the way to 2013's DTV video-game spinoff THE COMPANY OF HEROES and it's their LAST TOUR script that provides the foundation for DA 5 BLOODS, as four aging vets go back to Vietnam of the present day, ostensibly to retrieve the remains of their fallen friend, but with a second, off-the-record reason: to retrieve a chest of CIA gold they retrieved from a plane crash in 1971 and buried.
That B-movie premise has Bilson's and DeMeo's fingerprints all over it--one can imagine them saying "It's THE DEER HUNTER meets KELLY'S HEROES!"--but Lee goes bigger. He's mining superficially similar territory here with the African-American POV of his 2008 WWII film MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA, but DA 5 BLOODS tracks the fury of '60s activism (clips of Malcolm X, MLK, Kwame Ture) all the way through to the advent of Black Lives Matter and the Age of Trump, whose presence is felt here even beyond being referred to as "President Fake Bone Spurs." The four vets are Otis (Clarke Peters), Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Paul (Delroy Lindo), and though an ensemble piece for the most part, it's Paul who becomes the emotional center of the film. Still suffering from PTSD, short-tempered, paranoid, and with an ever-present chip on his shoulder and looking for confrontation everywhere, staunch conservative Paul is a ticking time bomb waiting to go off even before he starts parroting Trump talking points about immigrants, fake news, and "building the wall," plus other derogatory terms for the Vietnamese people. All of the men are haunted by the death of their unit leader and friend "Stormin' Norman" (Chadwick Boseman in flashbacks), killed in action back in 1971 just after they retrieved and buried the gold, but Paul has been unable to move on. That extends to his fractured relationship with his son David (Jonathan Majors), a liberal Black Studies instructor at Morehouse who's earned nothing but scornful derision from his father ("You've been an anchor around my neck since the day you were born"). Though there's no affection between them, David shows up at their Saigon hotel unexpectedly out of concern for his dad and insists on tagging along, telling him "You've been acting more crazy than usual."
Through wealthy investment broker Tien (Le Y Lan), a former prostitute that Otis knew during what the Vietnamese call "The American War," they meet with Desroche (Jean Reno), a French money launderer who agrees to convert the gold to cash for a 22% share (it was only 20%, but Paul starts getting belligerent about Normandy and how America had to "save France's ass" during WWII). With a map provided by guide Vinh (Johnny Tri Nguyen), they head back into the jungles of 'Nam in search of the gold and the burial spot of Stormin' Norman, with Paul sporting a red MAGA hat to everyone's disdain. The journey begins with a slow boat ride accompanied by Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries," which isn't the only APOCALYPSE NOW reference over the course of the film. There's even an APOCALYPSE NOW banner in a nightclub in downtown Saigon, where neon signs for McDonalds, Pizza Hut, and KFC illustrate how things have changed in the nearly 50 years since they were last there. There's also an invocation of "We don't need no stinkin' badges!" from THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE, and the references, shout-outs and the loose, freewheeling nature--with occasional cutaways to North Vietnamese radio propagandist Hanoi Hannah (Van Veronica Ngo)-- make this feel like a Quentin Tarantino film at times, not in terms of any revisionist history (Melvin does take the time to mock the '80s "free the POW" movies of Sylvester Stallone and "Walker, Texas Ranger"), but in a more enraged and politically substantive manner. Unlike what Bilson and DeMeo wrote for THE LAST TOUR, DA 5 BLOODS explores in depth the experience of the black soldier in Vietnam (Hanoi Hannah reminding them "Black G.I., is it fair that Negroes make up 11% of the US population but among American troops, you are 32%?) in ways that Hollywood typically hasn't focused on, aside from the mid '90s films DEAD PRESIDENTS and the virtually forgotten THE WALKING DEAD.
DA 5 BLOODS doesn't always feel cohesive as far as how the Bilson/DeMeo material meshes with what was written later by Lee and Willmott. At times, it's a straight-up treasure-hunt adventure once some Vietnamese adversaries led by the embittered Quan (Nguyen Ngoc Lam) enter the picture. It's also prone to some hard-to-swallow contrivances, like the discovery of the gold and Stormin' Norman's remains, as well as a trio of activists (Melanie Thierry, Paul Walter Hauser, and Jasper Paakkonen) who go into war zones to find and defuse land mines showing up exactly when their services are needed. Terence Blanchard's otherwise fine score seems a little intrusive and overbearing in the flashbacks, which Lee frames in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, with the jungle sequences at 1.85 and the Saigon scenes at 2.35. And as welcome as it might be, the anti-Trump sentiment feels occasionally wedged in, especially in an earlier scene where David has a conversation with the three activists at a Saigon bar. Lee also takes a big risk in having Lindo, Peters, Lewis, and Whitlock play their characters in the flashbacks minus any IRISHMAN-like CGI de-aging, but it works because they're presented in a kind-of stream-of-consciousness fashion and he mainly keeps the four of them in shadows or in the background as the focus is on Boseman. All in all, DA 5 BLOODS is a powerful film with a startling resonance to things happening right now. It also boasts a career-best performance by an absolutely riveting Lindo, who's alternately despicable, heartbreaking, and utterly devastating as Paul, whose story and the source of his Vietnam anguish, and the reasons he's been such an asshole to his son, don't fully come into view until late in the film, though you'll probably figure some of it out before then. Be sure to watch through the very end of the closing credits to catch a fun stinger for Isiah Whitlock Jr superfans.
CAPTIVE STATE (US - 2019) Directed by Rupert Wyatt. Written by Erica Beeney and Rupert Wyatt. Cast: John Goodman, Ashton Sanders, Vera Farmiga, Jonathan Majors, Kevin Dunn, James Ransone, Alan Ruck, Kevin J. O'Connor, Colson Baker, Madeline Brewer, Ben Daniels, D.B. Sweeney, Caitlin Ewald, KiKi Layne, Lawrence Grimm, Guy Van Swearingen, Rene Moreno, Michael Collins, Marc Grapey. (PG-13, 109 mins) Sometimes, flawed films that don't quite knock it out of the park end up being more interesting and more worthy of study than those we deem "great." CAPTIVE STATE is the kind of film that--let's just be honest here--is gonna tank in theaters. It's gonna tank hard. It's not what the ads make it look like, it's messy, it's a little disorienting in the way it throws out a lot of exposition in the early going, and it bites off a lot more than it can chew. But there's something here--it's politically and sociologically-loaded with historical metaphors, and takes a unique approach to its subject matter that almost guarantee it'll be the kind of film that has a serious cult following before it even leaves multiplexes in, well, probably a week. Shot two years ago, CAPTIVE STATE's release date was shuffled around multiple times--originally due out in summer 2018--as distributor Focus Features clearly had no idea what to do with it (I mean, what is that poster selling? The other one isn't any better). As a result, they're taking the easiest route possible and pushing it as a rote, run-of-the-mill alien invasion sci-fi actioner like it's another SKYLINE, and that does it a major disservice. Given the state of distribution today, it's a small victory that something like this even got made at all, let alone dumped on 2500 screens to certain doom. It's directed and co-written by Rupert Wyatt, best known for 2011's terrific RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. He directed 2014's THE GAMBLER in the interim, and while it looks like he had to make a few compromises, one can sense that CAPTIVE STATE is a pet project and something he's been ruminating on for quite some time.
In a prologue set in 2019, Earth is the target of an alien invasion. All of the world's major cities are seized by what are initially termed "roaches," alien beings of fluctuating, shape-shifting structure with a porcupine-like exterior. A cop and his wife are killed trying to flee Chicago, making orphans of their two young sons Rafael and Gabriel. Cut to a decade later, and the world remains under control of the "roaches," now known as their preferred title, "The Legislators." All of the governments of the planet acquiesced and ceded control to The Legislators. Everyone is tracked via implant, their actions monitored. Crime has gone down and jobs have increased. Income inequality is greater than ever--the rich have never been richer and the living conditions of the poor are atrocious. Criminals and non-conformists are taken "off-planet," and forced into slave labor, never given any thought by a population that, overall, has it pretty good since the takeover. The Legislators have stuck around and remain underground in major cities beneath "Closed Zones" off limits to humans without special access, usually limited to high-ranking government or police officials who are periodically summoned by The Legislators to receive their marching orders.
Gabriel (Ashton Sanders of MOONLIGHT) lives in the slums of Pilsen and scrapes by working in a factory downloading and cataloging the SIM cards of confiscated cell phones and mobile devices for inspection by The Legislators. He lives in the shadow cast by his big brother Rafael, a legendary resistance leader who was killed a few years earlier when he helped orchestrate a failed uprising that resulted in the complete destruction of Wicker Park at the hands of the outraged Legislators. There's a new insurgent group calling themselves Phoenix, and Chicago cop William Mulligan (John Goodman, in his second teaming with Wyatt after THE GAMBLER) is convinced they're about to strike and further incur the wrath of their extraterrestrial rulers, who have established a near-totalitarian society but remain generally hands-off as long as the ostensible leaders do what they're told and the population behaves itself. He's also watchful of Gabriel, whose father was his old partner back in the day. Sensing that Gabriel has something to do with Phoenix, he monitors his activities and finds out shortly after Gabriel does that Rafael (Jonathan Majors) is alive in the ruins of Wicker Park, having successfully faked his death, removed his tracking device and gone completely off the grid to regroup and lead another revolt to take back the planet. There's a planned 10th anniversary "Unity Rally" celebration for The Legislators at Soldier Field, and Rafael and the members of Phoenix plot an elaborate infiltration of the event that could mean the end of Chicago--and other cities if The Legislators are angry enough--if they fail.
Wyatt and his wife/co-writer Erica Beeney (THE BATTLE OF SHAKER HEIGHTS) aren't really interested in a standard-issue alien invasion chronicle. We've seen INDEPENDENCE DAY and a hundred other movies of that sort, so they take it from a different angle, instead focusing on the insurgency and the dogged attempts of the weary Mulligan--who has conflicts of interest, to put it mildly--to stop it. The best stretch of CAPTIVE STATE is the riveting middle, which deals with Phoenix's planning and executing the Soldier Field "Unity Rally" plot. It's got an almost MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE quality to it, but taken as a whole, the entire film feels like DISTRICT 9 if written by John Le Carre. This is an alien invasion story told in the style of classic nuts-and-bolts espionage. Phoenix uses the personals of the newspaper to communicate to its members; a radio DJ relays coded messages over the air; resistance members have clandestine conversations on still-functioning pay phones; walls barricading Chicago neighborhoods from Closed Zones have a very distinct Cold War-era Berlin look to them; debriefing rooms at the Legislator compounds are filled with interpreters on headsets and look like the drab, chilly offices of the spymasters in TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY; and Goodman even gets to monitor some activities in what looks like a low-tech version of a Bourne crisis suite. There's other, more contemporary jabs at the world's uncomfortable willingness to cave to autocratic rule without question, and the Chicago P.D. engaging in what looks very similar to all manner of "enhanced interrogation" in the style of Gitmo.
Propelled by a killer electronic score by Rob Simonsen, CAPTIVE STATE balances a large number of characters and their locations and unfolds like a compelling page-turner of a novel. It's admirable in its ambition, but yeah, it's not perfect. It doesn't handle Vera Farmiga's character very well, barely utilizing her in what seems to be a nothing role, virtually guaranteeing to the seasoned moviegoer that she'll be the center of any any third act "surprise." And what is intended as a twist ending doesn't play out as well as Wyatt planned, with a reveal that ends up feeling like an unsatisfying deus ex machina that might negate much of what came before. It may not follow through 100%, and it wouldn't be incorrect to say that it collapses when it matters most, but there's a lot of good stuff here that's smart, densely-plotted, thoughtfully-constructed, politically-charged with historical and literary inspiration (Gabriel's oppressive workplace is positively Kafka-esque). You can nit-pick why so many pay phones still exist in 2029 or why The Legislators still allow newspapers, but goddamn, this thing aims for the fences and goes for broke, and there's something to be said for that. It succeeds a lot more often that it fails, and in an era of endless sequels, franchises, remakes, reboots, and soulless, assembly-line, focus-grouped product, something this brazenly original and ambitious deserves to be recognized even if, in the big picture with all things considered, it maybe only rates a "B" instead of an "A+." Shortcomings and stumbles be damned, if a fervent cult following forms around CAPTIVE STATE, count me in.
