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Miracle at St. Anna

Buzz says:   MPAA Rating: R
Current Showtimes: No showtimes available

Spike Lee has always been known as a controversial filmmaker not afraid to take on the subject of race in his works. While some of his films have brought up important points about race in America, he is generally a very hit or miss director. Following up his acclaimed bank heist movie Inside Man, Lee switches genres to make a World War Two epic, with poor results.

The film opens in 1983 with Hector Negron, a post office employee who’s three months from retirement. One day, a man comes up to his counter and Hector shoots and kills him for seemingly no reason. The police investigate his apartment and find an old statue head from Italy buried in his closet. Through flashback, we learn that Hector was in the all African American 92nd Infantry Division fighting in Italy in World War Two. Hector, with three of his fellow soldiers, find a small boy their battlefield and decide to take him along with them. The group eventually gets behind enemy lines in a small peaceful town where they have to wait for American troops to rescue them.

Going in, I thought this would be an informative war film that tugged on my heartstrings, but this movie tries to be much more than that. In reality, this film is attempting three genres; a war film, a mystery, and an epic character study. This leaves the movie meandering through three stories that feels like a series of pointless scenes. For example, the beginning in 1983 with the statue head is engaging and fairly entertaining, but then the movie treats the statue as an afterthought for an hour afterwards. Sporadically hearing about the story you actually care about in a two hour and forty minute film is extremely frustrating when the other subplots aren’t interesting in the least.

One of the main problems with this film is that the majority of the emotional scenes are delivered so heavy-handedly that they come off as unintentionally funny. One of the four soldiers becomes very attached with the young boy and the scenes showing there companionship is handled so poorly I felt bad for the actor having to act so over-the-top.

Miracle at St. Anna is a disappointing effort from Spike Lee. Perhaps if the script was given another draft and trimmed down a few of the unnecessary storylines, this movie could’ve been more effective. There’s a good film somewhere in Miracle at St. Anna, but apparently Spike Lee would rather focus on the uneventful aspects of the story. The parts of the film that focused on racism in America were quite well done, but after those scenes you have to endure pointless scenes of exposition for subplots that go nowhere. I recommend that instead of seeing this movie, you stay at home and watch Saving Private Ryan again.