Spike Lee is one of those filmmakers where, good or bad, anytime he’s got a new work hitting the multiplex it’s cause for celebration. The man is one of the more singularly gifted talents of his generation, and from dramas like Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X, comedies like She’s Gotta Have It and Bamboozled, thrillers like Clockers and Inside Man, and documentaries like 4 Little Girls and When the Levees Broke there is no genre this man can’t touch and make distinctly his own.

Matteo Sciabordi, Omar Benson Miller and Michael Ealy in Touchstone Pictures' Miracle at St. Anna

Sadly, none of that matters a lick where it comes to his highly anticipated war drama Miracle at St. Anna. Based on the acclaimed novel by James McBride (who also wrote the screenplay) this is arguably the worst film of the director’s entire career. It is an ineptly constructed and furiously didactic picture that's about as dour and as pointless an exercise in tedium as anything I could ever have imagined, and sitting in the theater watching it uncoil borders on torture.

What’s even more infuriating is that the seeds of a wonderful motion picture are decidedly in place. The fictional story of four members of the very real WWII Army regiment knows as the Buffalo Soldiers, this movie has a potent hook and an intriguing central mystery impossible to resist. The long and the short of it is Lee and McBride plant the seeds of something incredible, they just forget to add the requisite nurturing and care required to see it grow.

When Staff Sergeant Aubrey Stamps (Derek Luke), Sergeant Bishop Cummings (Michael Ealy), Corporal Hector Negron (Laz Alonso) and Private First Class Sam Train (Omar Benson Miller) of the 92^nd Infantry Division find themselves trapped behind enemy lines, they tuck themselves away inside a small Italian town and try to plan their next move. When they’re ordered to take prisoner a German soldier for interrogation, safety for both themselves and for the residents of the village suddenly becomes their primary concern, a mysterious small boy named Angelo (Matteo Sciabordi) maybe holding the key which could lead to their collective salvation.

At least, that’s the movie I think Lee is trying to tell. It’s really hard to know in all honesty, this movie jumping around forwards and backwards through time like it’s a shell-shocked homage to Back to the Future and not an African American Guns of Navarone. Lee attempts to show the racial prejudices of the day aren’t exactly subtle, and while some of them pack a definite wallop (a set piece inside a Southern ice cream parlor is kinetic and stirring) most of them fall histrionically flat.

In all seriousness, I don’t think the director has ever made a film as pompous and as self-serving as this one. I can’t help but think that in the filmmaker’s push to bring the Buffalo Soldier’s story to the screen he put so much pressure on himself to do something profound and important he ended up using every melodramatic cliché and didactic familiarity in the entire book. The whole movie plays like a slideshow of greatest war movie hits, elements of Saving Private Ryan, The Longest Day, Battleground and, yes, Cannes Film Festival arguments notwithstanding, even Eastwood’s WWII epics Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima all on display here.

This wouldn’t be so bad if not for the freakish pointlessness of the whole thing. McBride’s screenplay builds to a coda straight out of Contact, while the climactic elements featuring the four main characters goes absolutely nowhere. Blood flows, shots are fired and people go out of their ways to be heroes but to what end? What is the miracle? Who is meant to be saved and why should we care if they ultimately are? None of these questions are answered, not a single one, and if all Lee was interested in saying was that Black soldiers got the shaft from the White officers in command during the war I can’t help but think he could have said it better than this.

And yet I can’t dismiss this mess of a movie entirely, the director far too good a filmmaker for that. There are some powerful moments, not the least of which is the sadly disturbing and horrifically gut-wrenching (based-on-fact) massacre of a group of Italian civilians. The 92^nd’s introduction attempting to cross a heavily defended river is also magnificently impressive, while John Tuturro’s brief cameo as a New York City police detective investigating a shocking post office murder is so fantastic and energizing it ends up arguably being the best thing about the entire movie.

Still, even with all this considered Miracle at St. Anna is a huge waste of time. At over 160-minutes long, there are huge meandering portions that could easily have been excised and not have hurt the overall dramatic subtext of the picture in the slightest. The elliptically obtuse structure recalls Bernardo Bertolucci’s massive epic 1900 but not in a good way, Lee trying for that same devil-may-care rhythm without ever coming close to doing it.

Ultimately, it comes down to of all things the usually reliable Terence Blanchard’s horrendously overpowering score. I knew the film was in trouble the moment the music started swelling and underscoring every little thing no matter how insignificant or slight. Subtlety flew out the window in the very first scene, the onerous strains of the strings and brass instruments alone enough to make me reach into my purse for a handful of Advil. 

But that is exactly what watching this film forces you to do. The director shows none of his usual flair for character, none of his idiosyncratic nuance for dialogue, the picture drowning in so much strum and drag keeping your head above water borders on the impossible. In fact, sad to say, the only thing miraculous about Miracle at St. Anna is when it’s finally over, Lee delivering a wearying mongrel of a war epic completely unworthy of the men it so desperately wants to celebrate.

Film Rating: êê (out of 4)

Additional Links

-  Miracle at St. Anna Theatrical Trailer