Spike Lee's rejoinder to Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Father (which he believes to have slighted—by omission—black soldiers who served during World War II) starts off strong, but slows drastically in midstream before lumbering to a vaguely unsatisfying conclusion. Based on the novel by James McBride, Miracle at St. Anna opens with an elderly postal worker shooting an old Italian man—a seemingly senseless crime that a reporter (Joseph Gordon Levitt) and a detective (John Turturro) eventually tie to the mystery surrounding a marble statue whose severed head was lugged around Italy by four heroic African-American soldiers some 40 years earlier. In a flashback, we see “Buffalo Soldiers” Cummings (Michael Ealy), Negron (Laz Alonso), Stamps (Derek Luke), and Train (Omar Benson Miller) in Italy narrowly surviving a Nazi ambush before making their way to a small village whose inhabitants welcome them with open arms. Bashful Stamps develops a crush on a sexy female resistance fighter (Valentina Cervi) and the simple-minded Train becomes fixated on a young orphan. While there's a decent 90-minute movie buried here, in its final form this is a bloated, near-three-hour endurance contest, marked by the director's self-indulgences and questionable artistic choices. Not a necessary purchase. [Note: DVD/Blu-ray extras include (on the Blu-ray release only; the DVD is extra-less) a 22-minute featurette on “The Buffalo Soldier Experience,” 21 minutes of deleted/extended scenes, a “Deeds Not Words” segment featuring director Spike Lee and real-life WWII veterans (17 min.), and trailers. Bottom line: a fine extras package for a flawed, overlong film.] (E. Hulse)
Miracle at St. Anna
Touchstone, 160 min., R, DVD: $29.99, Blu-ray: $34.99, Feb. 10 Volume 24, Issue 1
Miracle at St. Anna
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