Miracle at St. Anna: Critic Reviews

Miracle at St. Anna wants to do too many things at once to do any of them with much verve. It aspires to be a war epic, but it's dominated less by combat than by flat, meandering talk.

Setting the record straight after so many years and so many movies is not necessarily a simple undertaking, and this film sometimes stumbles under its heavy, self-imposed burden of historical significance.

Miracle at St. Anna aspires to be epic, but mostly it's just unfocused, sprawling and badly in need of editing.

Overwrought, overproduced, overbusy and overlong, Miracle at St. Anna finally suffers from the worst filmmaking sin of all: the failure of trust, in the story and the audience.

This movie is too many things without one of those things ever breaking your heart or boiling your blood.

Lee takes nearly three hours to tell this sad tale, but he never makes the most of the opportunity.

Given the importance of that subject, the real mystery of Mr. Lee's movie is why it's so diffuse, dispirited, emotionally distanced and dramatically inert.

Along the way, Mr. Lee has some gripping moments. But for every striking irony, there is a hammer-handed scene driving the same point into self-parody.

Lee brings a maturing sensibility and a talent for ensemble performance to a tale that is loving, angry and profoundly American.

Lee screws up his best ideas by trying to blow us away.

There are scenes that could have been lost to more decisive editing, but I found after a few days that my mind did the editing for me, and I was left with lasting impressions.

Malcolm X (1992) proved that Lee could rise to the challenge of a sweeping historical epic, but this 160-minute drama is overblown and unconvincing, the director's bright, poppy style clashing with the grim subject matter.

Miracle is, by turns, a dazzling, dim, lucid, confounding, absorbing, tedious, silly, profound, bloody and bracing account of four African American infantrymen separated from their Buffalo Soldiers unit in Tuscany during World War II.

Miracle is far from the sensitive racial politics Lee is capable of delivering, but darned if it isn't rousing good fun.

The movie undeniably has its powerful moments, but it runs a crooked, crazy race moving from one to another, leaving the viewer both exhausted and frustrated.

Ultimately Miracle at St. Anna aims too high, or at least at too many targets. Lee would have been better served to concentrate on one of the many aspects of the story.

Mr. Lee has stretched his material in so many different directions that one is left with unacceptable levels of religiosity and sentimentality in the overall context of the naked brutality we have witnessed.

Clocking in at 160 minutes, this is a sloppy stew in which the ingredients of battle action, murder mystery, little-kid sentiment and history lesson don't mix well.

The sad thing is, there's a perfectly fine, Sam Fulle-rish, 90-minute war movie on a worthy subject trapped somewhere in the self-indulgences of Miracle at St. Anna.

[A] sloppy, absurdly long mashup of combat film cliches.

[Lee] resorts to many of the same hoary cliches and fantasy situations he so frequently condemns.

Lee is a filmmaker who, through talent, accomplishment, and a constant working of the refs in the Hollywood system, has earned autonomy over his films. I'm all for artistic freedom, but here he could have used a bit of oversight.

Though it runs for roughly two hours and 40 minutes, there's nothing particularly epic about Spike Lee's version of the war.

It's impossible not to admire what Lee has wrought here, and the evident passion with which it has been brought to the screen. However, the realization is flawed, and those flaws make this 160-minute epic feel a little too much like an ordeal.