Movie Reviews: Da 5 Bloods (2020)

Genre: War Drama  

Director: Spike Lee  

Starring: Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Chadwick Boseman, Jonathan Majors, Melanie Thierry, Jean Reno, Paul Walter Hauser  

Running Time: 156 minutes  

Synopsis: Four black Vietnam War veterans (Delroy Lindo as Paul, Clarke Peters as Otis, Norm Lewis as Eddie, and Isiah Whitlock Jr. as Melvin) return to the country on a dual mission: find a cache of CIA gold they buried in the jungle during the war, and recover the remains of the inspirational fifth member of their group Norm (Chadwick Boseman). They are unexpectedly joined on their trek by Paul's estranged son David (Jonathan Majors). Although united by friendship, a sense of racial injustice, and wartime experiences, the group is tested by greed, mistrust, and trauma.

What Works Well: Spike Lee presents the Vietnam War experience as an epic collision between an unpopular overseas war and the continuing struggle for black rights at home. This is a sprawling journey into the past, the men's present psychology (especially Paul's PTSD) ill-equipping them to retrace hostile terrain. The country may have modernized, but not so much the jungle, where dangers from snakes to mines persist. With strong echoes of The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, greed is the most mammoth disrupter, and the seemingly tight knit group will discover that unimaginable wealth can threaten decades-long friendships forged under fire. Lee adds generous helpings of flashbacks to fill-in the men's combat-fueled backstory, as the war spills from the past into present moments of reckoning.

What Does Not Work As Well: The running time is excessive, with look-at-me editing adding to the test of endurance. Delroy Lindo's performance is powerful, but slips into over-the-top theatrics in the final act. The political preaching is of the in-your-face variety, the plot used as an unsubtle device to deliver rage-against-the-machine civics lessons.

Key Quote:

Paul: We fought in an immoral war that wasn't ours for rights we didn't have.

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Movie Review: The Core (2003)

Genre: Sci-Fi Disaster Thriller  
Director: Jon Amiel  

Starring: Hilary Swank, Aaron Eckhart, Richard Jenkins, Stanley Tucci, Delroy Lindo, Alfre Woodard, Bruce Greenwood  
Running Time: 135 minutes  

Synopsis: College professor and geophysicist Dr. Josh Keyes (Aaron Eckhart) analyzes a series of unusual phenomena and concludes that the rotation of the Earth's core has been disrupted, which will result in imminent mass destruction. In a hurriedly planned mission, Josh is teamed with a crew including the arrogant Dr. Zimsky (Stanley Tucci), astronaut Beck (Hilary Swank), and brilliant inventor Braz (Delroy Lindo). They have to bore through the Earth in a specially designed vessel, and then detonate nuclear bombs to reactivate the core.

What Works Well: The opening act features a series of gripping-enough catastrophes, including pacemaker failures, disoriented birds, and an improvised space shuttle landing. The scenes featuring Dr. Keyes and Dr. Zimsky explaining their conclusions to military and political leaders are reasonably effective in establishing the premise.

What Does Not Work As Well: The rest of the film drowns in increasingly preposterous nonsense. While Sci-Fi need not be grounded in actual science, the on-the-fly silliness in this script classifies as junk. Lowlights include "unobtanium" material that can withstand enormous pressure, mission preparations that come together in three months, improvised calculations to solve complex problems in mere minutes, and a slapped-on evil plot that never gains traction. The all-too-serious attitude does not help, the special effects are patchy at best, the running time is unnecessarily prolonged, and too many scenes feature scale models of a caterpillar-like vessel navigating murky soup.

Key Quote:

Dr. Josh Keyes: So, we hotwire the nukes, as one does. We seed them through the core at locations that have to be accurate to the inch. We detonate them in a sequence that has to be accurate to the millisecond. Then we outrun the biggest nuclear shockwave in history.

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Movie Review: Sinners (2025)

Genre: Supernatural Drama Horror Thriller  

Director: Ryan Cooglar  

Starring: Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Jack O'Connell, Delroy Lindo  

Running Time: 137 minutes  

Synopsis: In Mississippi of 1932, twin criminal brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) return from a stint in Chicago determined to open and operate a juke joint for the black community. Their 17 year-old guitar-playing cousin Samuel (Miles Caton) is the star attraction, over the objections of his preacher father Jedidiah (Saul Williams). Old-timer Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) and singer Pearline (Jayme Lawson) are the other recruited performers. Smoke reunites with his estranged wife Annie (Wunmi Musako) and Stack tangles with ex-girlfriend Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), but all seems to be going relatively well on opening night until evil personified in Remmick (Jack O'Connell) crashes the party.

What Works Well: Writer and director Ryan Cooglar conjures up an endlessly entertaining and imaginatively artistic wild genre mash-up, most reminiscent of From Dusk Till Dawn. While vampires, violence, blood, gore, and a high body count (all accompanied by a mean humour streak) dominate the second half, the more serious themes established in the opening hour underpin the mayhem. These include music as a cross-generational influence carrying enormous power, crime as a gateway to hell, and the lure of selling black culture to the wrong power brokers yielding decadence. Bathed in visual beauty and decorated by sensational musical numbers, the storytelling benefits from patient pacing anchored in memorable characters and a strong sense of time and place.

What Does Not Work As Well:  Although Michael B. Jordan is excellent, more could have been done to differentiate the twins. Mary's backstory suffers from neglect relative to her intended influence, and a Ku Klux Klan tertiary sub-plot is awkwardly bolted on. The value of the meandering ending is debatable

Key Quote:

Jedidiah: You keep dancing with the devil... one day he's gonna follow you home.



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Movie Review: Heist (2001)

Genre: Crime Thriller

Director: David Mamet

Starring: Gene Hackman, Danny DeVito, Delroy Lindo, Sam Rockwell, Rebecca Pidgeon

Running Time: 109 minutes

Synopsis: A specialist in high-value heists, Joe (Gene Hackman) leads a gang consisting of wife Fran (Rebecca Pidgeon) and long-time associates Bobby (Delroy Lindo) and Pinky (Ricky Jay). After his face is exposed during a jewelry store robbery, Joe seeks to retire but has a falling out with criminal financier Mickey (Danny DeVito). He is pressured to proceed with a gold heist and forced to include Mickey's nephew Jimmy (Sam Rockwell) in the plan. 

What Works Well: David Mamet directs with cold efficiency, the dialogue lines are packed with zing, and the action scenes are coiled with tension. Gene Hackman is dependably cerebral.

What Does Not Work Well: The remarkably obscure plot details enable limitless opportunities for requisite backstabbing and double-crossing, which means all the displayed actions and motivations are immediately labeled dubious. The characters remain stubbornly superficial, with Danny DeVito phoning in his performance. The plot is riddled with logic gaps and the final act unravels into an anything-goes muddled mess.

Conclusion: The quest for postured cleverness sacrifices plot fundamentals.



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Movie Review: Ransom (1996)

A child kidnapping thriller, Ransom enjoys excellent production values, a committed Mel Gibson performance and a determination to accentuate the cerebral aspects of crime gamesmanship.

Tom Mullen (Gibson) is a successful businessman, the head of a major airline that he created from humble beginnings. He lives in a swanky Manhattan condominium overlooking Central Park with his wife Kate (Rene Russo) and young son Sean (Brawley Nolte). However, there is a shadow hanging over Tom's business dealings involving unproven accusations of illegal payments to avoid a union strike. The Mullens' world is plunged into a nightmare when Sean is abducted during an outdoor public event. Tom and Kate soon receive a ransom demand for $2 million, and FBI Agent Lonnie Hawkins (Delroy Lindo) takes charge of the investigation.

The kidnap mastermind is New York Police Detective Jimmy Shaker (Gary Sinise), who is disgusted with Tom's seemingly shady business ethics. Jimmy's crew consists of girlfriend Maris (Lili Taylor), tech expert Miles (Evan Handler), and brothers Clark and Cubby (Liev Schreiber and Donnie Wahlberg). Sean is handcuffed to a bed and blindfolded while Jimmy makes his demands, with Tom and Kate wondering how much they can trust Lonnie's advice. When an arranged money drop goes bad, Sean's life is placed in grave danger, and Tom decides that a fundamental change in negotiating tactics is needed.

Directed by Ron Howard, Ransom is an intelligent thriller which relies on plot and characters and resists most impulses to engage in mindless action. The film remains grounded in relative foundations of reality, and the kidnapping ordeal enjoys a trio of excellent, out of the box twists. The drama is well paced, the two hours of running time efficiently used to recount a story rich in detail and resolve.

The script by Richard Price and Alexander Ignon gets the fundamentals right by investing in both sides of the kidnapping. While Tom and Kate's trauma does get the majority of attention, a significant amount of time is spent with Jimmy and his gang, humanizing the criminals and building to an effective climax where the need for complex decisions will come to the fore at the individual level.

The central twist in the negotiations, a ploy too clever to reveal, sets the film off in a new direction and radically changes the dynamic between Jimmy, Tom and Kate. It's an idea both foolish and audacious, and sets the film apart from most other kidnap thrillers. Of course all daring initiatives can suffer from the law of unintended consequences, and Ransom rides one wild notion straight into another, victim and perpetrator locking horns and engaging in a new battle of wits within an unexpected context.

Howard infuses the film with his usual commitment to quality, and Ransom enjoys lush cinematography courtesy of Piotr Sobocińsk, attractive locations and the occasional on-the-street burst of dynamism. Not unexpectedly, there are hints of big budget over orchestration in some scenes, Howard always choosing multiple helicopters and hordes of extras when more intriguing and more modest options were perhaps available.

Mel Gibson delivers a surprisingly effective performance. He tones down both his boyish charm and his manic intensity, and settles into the relatively steady tone of a concerned father who nevertheless will not subdue his entrepreneurial inclination to seek a different and better solution. Gary Sinise offers a perfect foil as the smart and determined police detective moonlighting as a criminal, although more background on what fueled Jimmy Shaker's motivation would have been welcome. The rest of the cast is brimming with talent and provides solid support.

Canny and resourceful, Ransom delivers a satisfying pay off.

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