The conflicted and heroic history of World War II's Buffalo Soldiers deserves to be told in a dramatic and thoughtful movie. Unfortunately, Miracle at St. Anna is neither of those things. After seeing the subtle trailer, I was curious how Spike Lee's style would translate into a war epic, but I never imagined this. The overdone melodrama is so weighed down with trivial details that it loses the potentially powerful impact of its subject matter.

With Miracle at St. Anna, Lee sets out to correct that fact that black soldiers have been largely absent from WWII cinema and memory. To that end, the story follows four members of the 92nd Infantry Division, comprised of 15,000 African-American troops. After a devastating battle on the Italian frontlines, the surviving foursome — Stamps (Derek Luke), Bishop (Michael Ealy), Hector (Laz Alonso), and Train (Omar Benson Miller) — are left to fend for themselves with a broken radio and an injured Italian kid they've picked up along the way. For what goes wrong, read more.

Lee capably conveys the neglect the soldiers suffer at the hands of their white commanders, and you feel the ache of these heroes fighting for a country so dismissive of them. Especially powerful is a battlefield scene in which the Buffalo Soldiers are forced to listen to the bewitching voice of "Axis Sally" (Germany's version of Tokyo Rose) promising racial equality, good food, and beautiful women if they surrender. Unfortunately, most of the movie is sorely lacking the emotional weight it deserves.

As ambitious as Miracle is in concept, it's amateurish in execution and often insulting to moviegoers' intelligence. The war story is bookended by a modern-day mystery: One of our vets is accused of murder, and cops find an ancient Italian artifact in his closet. The story isn't revisited until the final scene of the unnecessarily long 160-minute movie, at which point the "mystery" is solved in a way that viewers will see coming from miles away. (But just in case we don't, the characters spell it all out in laughably explanatory dialogue.)

Throughout the movie, the dramatic tension is deflated by a melodramatic musical score and heavy-handed script by James McBride, who wrote the novel on which the film is based. Frequently, the characters deliver lines that clumsily explain plot points or, even worse, elaborate on the cultural commentary that should be intrinsic. Miracle at St. Anna is also plagued by several scenes that just defy logic. For instance, if the Italian boy understands the word "no" and knows that nodding means "yes," why must he and Train communicate through a system of taps, where one tap means "yes" and two taps mean "no"? Because it figures into the plot later, of course!

When the mystery borders on farce, overexaggerated performances by Ealy and Miller don't do it any favors. But I was impressed by Luke as the level-headed Stamps and Alonso in the multilayered role of Hector; both manage to convey gravitas in a movie that's lacking it. But frankly, I expected more from Spike Lee.

Photos courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures


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