A Spike in the War Chest

Spike Lee sometimes makes movies that are too provocative for critics to think straight. It’s hard to imagine, say, his complex 2000 satire on race and the press, “Bamboozled,” enjoying widespread acclaim upon its release, no matter its quality. But Mr. Lee’s new World War II film, “Miracle at St. Anna,” which opens Friday, is not an example of the director’s volatile filmic chemistry blowing up the laboratory. It’s just not very good, never mind compelling enough to sustain a 160-minute sprawl that, at the end, leaves one puzzling over where exactly the time went.Adapted from the novel by James McBride, “Miracle at St. Anna” is about four American soldiers from the all-black 92nd Division who become marooned in an Italian mountain village behind enemy lines. They’re survivors of a riverside slaughter partly caused by a racist commander’s intransigence. A cast of young actors (Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso) play three of the “Buffalo Soldiers,” with Omar Benson Miller in the fourth, irredeemable role of a superstitious Southern simpleton. A fearful Italian family’s house provides shelter within the labyrinth of stone walkways and houses.Bookending “Miracle” is a mystery, set in 1983, about a black postal worker who shoots a customer for no apparent reason. This strange frame is, typically enough, one of Mr. Lee’s better moves, a blunt but interesting displacement of war’s unknowability to outsiders. But the wartime subplots, in the screenplay by Mr. McBride, are poorly juggled and conceived; the friendship between Mr. Miller’s character and a traumatized, possibly insane Italian boy, is a maudlin mess, as are the divisions within a local group of Italian partisans. A fierce street battle at the end is at least often nerve-wracking, and Mr. Lee’s frequent director of photography, Matthew Libatique, achieves a humid prestige look.Early in the segment set in 1983, a black veteran is shown talking back to a TV broadcast of John Wayne blustering in “The Longest Day,” underlining the avowed purpose of “Miracle”: to represent the experiences of black soldiers to an extent never achieved in war cinema. But in a sense, Mr. Lee has tragically tried to remake all of those movies at once, up to and including the true horror story of the Nazis’ massacre of 560 Italian civilians. The result is exhausting for the wrong reasons, instead of being as disarming and adventurous as the filmmaker can be at his best.

A Spike in the War Chest

More from the New York Sun

‘Ulster American’ Is a Bawdy Send Up of Progressive Pieties — and an Irreverent Inquiry Into Irishness

Republican Congressman Calls for Tucker Carlson To Be Prosecuted for ‘Treason’ for Pre-War Contact With Iranians

American Socialists To Join New Cuba Aid Flotilla Despite Hints of Negotiations Aimed at Ousting Communist Leadership

Trump’s Pared-Back Tariffs Return to Trade Court Under New Legal Rationale

North Korean Leader’s Daughter, 13, Shows Up at Missile-Firing Exercise Looking All the More Like His Heir Apparent

Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Unfaithful Hollywood Adaptation

Will Hollywood Bite Its Tongue at the Oscars?

Reuters Claims To Have Unmasked Banksy After Extensive Investigation