Spike Lee sends four Black veterans back to Vietnam for buried gold and a dead friend, and cannot decide whether he is making a heist film, a war film or a lecture. Delroy Lindo holds all three together, just, for 155 minutes.
Spike Lee has made a film about four Black veterans going back to Vietnam, and he has tried to make four films at once. A reunion picture: old men in a hotel bar, ribbing each other about their knees. A treasure hunt, with a buried crate of gold bars and a fixer to launder them. A war film, shot in flashback. And a history lecture, cut in as archive footage, beginning with Muhammad Ali explaining why he would not go. All four are in there for 155 minutes. Two of them are good.
It is worth your evening, and the reason is Delroy Lindo. Paul is the one who came home angriest and stayed that way: a widower who wears a red MAGA cap around Ho Chi Minh City and dares anyone to mention it, and who cannot forgive his son David (Jonathan Majors) for turning up. Lindo plays him loud from the first scene and we braced for two and a half hours of shouting. It is not that. The moment that got at us is early and small: Paul at the floating market, screaming at a hawker over a chicken, and then the look on Lindo’s face when he sees the others staring at him. We were shaken, because we had been laughing at the man a minute before. We kept our distance from Paul for most of the film, and Lindo took hold of us anyway.
The others get less and use it. Clarke Peters is the quiet centre as Otis, the medic who arranged the trip and has a reason of his own in Tiên Luu (Lê Y Lan), the woman he left behind. Norm Lewis and Isiah Whitlock Jr. do the reunion comedy, and Whitlock gets the biggest laugh with one drawn-out word. The fifth Blood, their squad leader, appears only in flashback, and here Lee makes his best decision. Newton Thomas Sigel shoots the war in grainy, near-square 16mm, and the four old men play their young selves with no de-ageing at all: grey hair, bellies, reading glasses in a jungle. It sounds like a budget compromise and it is the truest thing in the film. They remember themselves as they are now, and him as he always was.
Present-day Vietnam is shot wide and bright, and Wynn Thomas’s production design gives us a country that has turned the war into a tourist trade: a bar called Apocalypse Now, a floating market, a hawker trying to sell the veterans a live chicken. Donna Berwick puts the four in the linen and cargo shorts of men with money for once, with Paul’s cap the only colour that matters. Lee quotes Apocalypse Now (1979) openly, Wagner on the river included, and the joke is that these men have seen it too. Terence Blanchard’s score is the trouble. Brass and strings rise under nearly every scene until we stopped hearing them. When Lee drops it for Marvin Gaye, the film breathes.
Then the shovels come out. The second half takes a turn we will not describe, except to say that it has more guns in it than the first, and that Mélanie Thierry, Paul Walter Hauser and Jasper Pääkkönen, as landmine-clearers the veterans meet in a bar, seem to have walked in from another script. The landmine scene itself is superbly done; Adam Gough cuts it slowly, on feet and faces, and we did not breathe. The shootouts are flat, the Vietnamese characters get one trait each, and Thierry’s Hedy is there to be looked at and then to be brave. Around the two-hour mark we were bored, and then irritated at being bored by a film with this much in it.
We are in two minds about the archive inserts. The cutaways to Ali, to Malcolm X, to photographs of Black soldiers who did not come home, are what Lee did in BlacKkKlansman (2018), and they land hardest when they interrupt a joke. Too often they interrupt a scene that was already making the point. Four writers, Lee, Kevin Willmott, Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo, means there is always another point to make. Do the Right Thing (1989) said as much in one hot day on one street.
See it, for Lindo and for the flashbacks, and give it the whole evening in one sitting. It is half an hour too long, and nearly all of that half hour is in the jungle. Lindo’s face is still with us a week later. So, less happily, is the score.
