Film reviews: Da 5 Bloods | The King of Staten Island

Da 5 Bloods (15) ****

The King of Staten Island (15) ****

Artemis Fowl (12A) **

As a filmmaker, Spike Lee has been exposing the complicated machinations of American racism since he broke onto the scene in the mid-1980s. It’s little wonder, then, that as the rest of the world wakes up to the situation he’s been dramatising and documenting for decades, his new film, the Netflix funded Da 5 Bloods, feels about as current as a film can possibly be. Exploring the catastrophe of the Vietnam war via a quartet of ageing Black American veterans returning to present-day Ho Chi Minh City to track down the body of their fallen commander (played Chadwick Boseman), the film, which stars Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr and Norm Lewis, provides yet another layer of historical context for the current mess in the US.

Building on the fusion of styles and formats that’s been a recurring feature in many of his more overtly political films, Lee punctuates the narrative with archival and contemporary news footage, something that helps him directly tie the disproportionate sacrifices of black soldiers during the war and black activists on the front lines of the civil rights struggle to the age of Black Lives Matter and Donald Trump. But the film isn’t just a history lesson or an unapologetic piece of agitprop; it’s also a Three Kings-style action movie, one in which the protagonists’ stated mission masks a covert treasure hunt that muddies and complicates their forged-in-war bond and exposes the divergent lives they’ve led in the conflict’s aftermath, themes teased out by present day reminiscences and flashbacks to the 1968 tour of duty they were on when the news filtered through that Martin Luther King had been murdered – a tour of duty that would later cost their squad leader his life.

Shot in boxy 16mm to mimic the documentary footage of the times, these flashbacks haven’t been blessed with a massive effects budget à la Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. In what turns out to be the film’s most audacious artistic conceit, Lee makes zero effort to de-age the cast or find younger look-a-likes; instead we see Lindo, Peters, Lewis and Whitlock sharing scenes with Boseman in the jungle, which, far from taking us out of the moment, plugs us more directly and effectively into it. This is a film about the inescapability of the past and the never-ending trauma of war on those forced to participate in it; it makes formalistic sense that the bodies we see in the period combat scenes reflect the physical ravages the war will take on those who survive it.

Although ostensibly an ensemble piece, the narrative driving force here is really Lindo’s Paul. For reasons gradually made clear, he’s the most haunted, embittered and psychologically scarred of the bunch. He’s also a character Lee has made an actual Trump supporter, not as a way of making a cheap joke about the mindset of those who voted for him, but as a way of subtly underscoring the grim depths of betrayal and systemic injustice someone like him must have endured to find solace in someone like Trump. Lindo, who’s worked with Lee three times before, certainly seizes the opportunity this rare leading role gives him and he gives everything he’s got to the character’s almost Shakespearean descent into madness.

All of which helps mitigate the way the film’s more commercial elements – Lee adapted it from a one-time Oliver Stone project – can sometimes feel a little generic in a way that the detective movie aspects of BlacKkKlansman never did. But as with the Hughes brothers’ 1995 Vietnam thriller Dead Presidents, there’s real power to seeing this period in history told from a hitherto marginalised perspective, not least because what it’s showing us is not just history. It’s what’s happening now.

Judd Apatow’s films have always toggled between puerility and profundity, but his latest, The King of Staten Island, initially seems at a loss as to how to pull this off. Though the film sets up its protagonist, aspiring tattoo artist Scott Carlin (Pete Davidson), as another developmentally arrested 20-something pothead who still lives with his mother, it doesn’t feel remotely funny. That, however, might be the point. Co-written by Davidson and loosely based on the stand-up comic and Saturday Night Live cast member’s own struggles with borderline personality disorder, the tonal uncertainty of the film’s first act seems like Apatow’s way of throwing us off balance to better reflect its protagonist’s somewhat fragile state of mind, particularly as his mental health issues continue to amplify the childhood trauma of loosing his firefighter father 17 years earlier (Davidson lost his own firefighter father on 9/11).

That doesn’t mean that what follows is a soul-baring misery-fest. If anything, this semi-autobiographical reality check actually loosens the movie up enough to let the laughs flow more freely – something that happens the moment Davidson’s fellow stand-up Bill Burr turns up as Ray, a fireman who starts dating Scott’s mother (Marisa Tomei – typically brilliant). Detractors who dislike the bagginess of Apatow’s films won’t find any relief here (it’s 140 minutes long), but the combination of sweetness, pain and truthfulness underpinning Davidson’s belated coming-of-age story proves oddly endearing, largely because he doesn’t play to the crowd.

Having had its cinematic release delayed from last summer and then cancelled after Covid-19 struck, Disney’s long-gestating, Kenneth Branagh-directed adaptation of Eoin Cofler’s best-selling YA novel Artemis Fowl debuts instead on Disney+. That seems about right: the film plays like a much more modest fantasy adventure film than the epic franchise starter suggested by its reported $125m budget. Set against a backdrop of an Irish folklore-riffing magical underworld and revolving around a super-smart 12-year-old criminal mastermind (newcomer Ferdia Shaw) on a mission to rescue his kidnapped father (Colin Farrell), the film seems unlikely to dethrone Harry Potter any time soon. ■

Da 5 Bloods is streaming on Netflix; The King of Staten Island is available on all major digital platforms; Artemis Fowl is on Disney+

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Film reviews: Da 5 Bloods | The King of Staten Island | Artemis Fowl