Da 5 Bloods, the newest movie from accomplished director Spike Lee, is not subtle with its message. It’s gory, profane and incredibly tense, with imagery of real Vietnam violence and police brutality. Sometimes you may want to walk away or turn the movie off, but in typical Spike Lee fashion, Da 5 Bloods delivers its message in a smart, provocative way that keeps you watching to the very end. 

The movie takes place in Vietnam and centers around a group of African American veterans who have gone back after 60 years to find the body of their friend and retrieve the millions of dollars worth of gold they lost. From the get-go, the movie feels frantic as a montage of racial protests, police brutality and burning monks flashes by while “Time Has Come At Last” by The Chamber Brothers screams in the background.  The movie then drops into modern-day Hanoi, where we see our four main characters meet at the airport. They greet each other, make a few jokes and then get on their way. This feels oddly calm compared to the feverish montage that played just a minute ago, and that’s the point. The movie draws you in with its beautiful vision of modern-day Vietnam, and besides a few panic attacks from one character, stays relatively tame all the way up until one scene. Suddenly, Spike Lee annihilates the delusion that Vietnam has nothing left of the war and does it in a very gory fashion. From here on, the characters’ mental states spiral downwards as horrendous memories of the war come back, and through them, very big secrets are revealed. Da 5 Bloods climaxes in a terrifying sequence of gunshots and screaming, a perfect ending to such a raw, visceral movie. Despite the insanity of its ending, Da 5 Bloods ends on a generally happy note.

Like all of Spike Lee’s movies, Da 5 Bloods has a message about race. Lee seeks to expose a broader audience to the life of African Americans fighting in the Vietnam War through a facet that he has rarely dabbled with: war. But Da 5 Bloods also feels epic compared to other Spike Lee movies like Do The Right Thing or BlacKkKlansman, for it manages to make its message have far more weight by showing how bad the consequences are for failure. Ultimately, though, Da 5 Bloods does everything that Spike Lee’s best movies always do: it reels you in, shocks you and keeps you hooked until the very end, delivering a message about race that you won’t soon forget.