| Netflix | Release Date (Streaming): June 12, 2020 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
42
Mixed:
5
Negative:
2
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Critic Reviews
Jul 7, 2020
The teeming profusion of events that Lee dramatizes is inseparable from the historiography that he foregrounds throughout. Both are brought to life with an intricately varied texture of dialogue and gesture, purpose and spirit—a crucial aspect of Lee’s career-long artistry that, here, reaches new heights, thanks to an extraordinary cast of actors who blend fervor and nuance, and whom Lee directs with manifest inspiration.
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Jun 18, 2020
What I didn’t expect—what kept me committed to Da 5 Bloods even as, at times, its looseness risked dulling what proves so fiery and strange about it—was that it would make me so sad. I think I have Lindo, especially, to blame for that. What a face. What anger. Real ones already knew what he was capable of, of course. But Da 5 Bloods gives him more room.
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Jun 12, 2020
If the necessities of the moment mean that Da 5 Bloods won’t get the big theatrical run it deserves, its bold immediacy still hits hard on a smaller screen. Hollywood has made many stirring tales of war heroism, of honor gained and lives lost, and even of the failures of the countries that sent men into battle. But there are shockingly few stories like this one.
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Jun 11, 2020
Even as it interrogates the traditional rules of its genre, Da 5 Bloods remains an outstanding war movie about the values at the core of most great films of its kind, like honor and brotherhood. And Da 5 Bloods is also a great heist movie about the values at the core of all great heist movies, like greed and distrust. The friction between those two genres generates incredible tension as the story progresses.
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Jun 10, 2020
Jun 11, 2020
The picture has an ungainly shape, and certain dramatic notes don’t resonate with the boldness they need: when a tragedy strikes, the characters barely react. The story keeps moving like a freight train chugging along the track, and the effect is disorienting. But even when Lee makes a flawed film, his spirit is a kind of braille, a code you can feel and see.
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Jun 10, 2020
The in-country trek at the heart of the film is pretty routine by Lee’s standards; it’s the way he tells that story, the asides and the history lessons and the cutaways and the tricks that have become the director’s singular cinematic vocabulary, that make it a must-see in these stormy times.
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The TelegraphJun 10, 2020
With a story that straddles two generations and stretches from Trump’s United States to the Vietnam jungle, Da 5 Bloods is one of Spike Lee’s most expansive films to date. But it’s built with the precise, snap-shut mechanisms of an ancient moral fable – a Pardoner’s Tale made about and for unpardonable times.
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Jun 10, 2020
Lee is firing off rounds in all directions here. Some land, some distract, some feel like overkill. For cineastes, it’s a provocative redrawing of the canon; Coming Home or The Deerhunter, and even Stone’s so-called “definitive” work including Platoon now seem only part of the picture.
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Jun 10, 2020
The tonal shifts can be so abrupt as to induce whiplash, not to mention a kind of moral and narrative chaos, which seems to be very much to the movie’s point. The rich, tumultuous history of Black life over the past century could certainly find a worse cinematic analogue than this heady swirl of wry comedy, seductive music, ferocious argument and devastating carnage.
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Jun 10, 2020IndieWireJun 10, 2020
Jun 10, 2020
It’s a strange thing when a movie is at its most dynamic when it’s at its most didactic. But that’s the case with Da 5 Bloods. Lee is consciously juggling a lot of balls: not just fact and fiction, past and present, but also humor, action, family drama, and tragedy. The balls don’t stay in the air. The movie has the bumpety-bump pacing of a mini-series forced into a single overlong episode.
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Jun 10, 2020
Spike Lee’s cultural messaging for once fails him in the politically muddled Da 5 Bloods. With the film, Lee offers his submission to a history of bloodied, masculine Vietnam War movies. Sadly, he’s more concerned with making a Vietnam movie that looks Black than one that actually takes on the complexities of Blackness, war, and global imperialism.
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Movie NationJun 12, 2020
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