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75Contains scenes of brilliance, interrupted by scenes that meander. There is too much, too many characters, too many subplots. But there is so much here that is powerful that it should be seen no matter its imperfections.
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75Man, oh, man, much of the dialogue is so heavy, and heavy-handed, that you can see fine actors such as Derek Luke and Michael Ealy buckle under the weight. Clearly, Lee fell in love with McBride's words and couldn't bear to cut them, even when the visuals made those words redundant.
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75For all his excesses and wrong turns, Lee has made a grown-up movie with an adult sense of loss and an adult sense of hope. He may be addicted to broad flourishes, but he has the big emotions to back them up.
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70So think of it this way: Miracle at St. Anna is a Spike Lee joint that possesses a European texture in the vein of Guillermo Del Toro and Jean Pierre-Jeunet. Imaginative, thought-provoking, and intense.
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63Miracle at St. Anna is overlong and poorly focused. It tends to meander, the military context is not well established, and too much time is spent on interaction with underdeveloped secondary characters.
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55Even in a film that clocks in at a quasi-epic 2 hours and 40 minutes, that's just too much narrative. And matters aren't helped by the fact that Lee, who has never staged battle sequences before, hasn't quite got the rhythms or camera angles right.
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50The film collapses because Lee can't sew these vignettes into a seamless tapestry. He's more interested in getting even than he is in getting it right.
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50Half the time I wasn't sure what Lee was going for in terms of tone, or style, or focus. It was a tricky assignment to begin with, because McBride's novel, and his screenplay, is part socio-historical corrective, part magical-realist folklore, part wartime procedural.
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50Lee's framing device - which ends with a head-scratching fantasy - doesn't work. At. All.
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50This is first Lee's first attempt at a war epic, but it feels like it's his very first film: What should have been an eloquent answer to the likes of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood -- with whom Lee justly took to task over the total absence of any black soldiers in "The Flags Of Our Fathers" -- is instead a patchy war-time drama.
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50Aspires to be epic, but mostly it's just unfocused, sprawling and badly in need of editing.
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50Miracle at St. Anna is not work of outrage or joy. It's something distressingly new for the filmmaker: a work of obligation. It feels like a movie Lee made in order to say he did it.
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50Throughout, Terence Blanchard's score swells and sweeps, reminding us, at every moment, what we're supposed to feel. If only we knew what we were supposed to think of this trite mess.
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50Of course the experiences and sacrifices of black troops, which were so often overlooked, should be represented and honored. But because Lee underestimates our desire to do so, the movie that follows doesn't do them justice.
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50Lee is not an action director, and the movie often feels like it was made in the 1940s rather than set then.
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50It's all too much and too little: a history lesson in institutional racism that falls into character cliches, a human drama that gets lost in melodramatic detours, a war movie put together by a fan rather than a filmmaker.
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50A picture that's dramatically compelling in some places and plodding and didactic in others.
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50It is in the fragile bonds that form between the black soldiers and the Italian villagers that Miracle at St. Anna breaks free of its own grandiosity and tells a grounded, moving, human story. Not a miracle by any means, but an earthy inquiry into death, duty, friendship and honor. What we've always wanted from war movies.
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42Miracle isn't powerful, it's muddled and diffuse.
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Miracle plays like "School Daze" transplanted to the European front, with the token militant, the token uplift-the-race type, and the token buffoon all marching inexorably toward Checkpoint Irony.
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42Clocking in at 160 minutes, this interminable movie comes across like a rough cut. Perhaps Lee believed its length would give it gravitas. The opposite is true.
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30Odd too, for a film that wants to correct impression anyone had as to the abilities of black U.S. soldier in combat, are the ethnic cliches about Italians and Germans, to say nothing of rednecks.
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30When Lee isn't doing cinematic somersaults or mining for injustice, he doesn't seem to know where to put the camera. The logistics of the plot make no sense, and he has nothing to sell but the theme of our common humanity--in which, on the evidence, I don't think he believes.
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30Pedestrian and awkward, this film is a disappointment not only in comparison with Lee's earlier epic, the underrated " Malcolm X," but also in comparison with another film with similar aims, Rachid Bouchareb's "Days of Glory."
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30The movie winds up a casualty of schmaltzy, patronizing sentiment on the one hand and overweening ambition on the other.
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30Overblown and unconvincing, the director's bright, poppy style clashing with the grim subject matter.
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25The first and most honest thing to say about Miracle at St. Anna is that it's an awful mess.
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20And for all Lee's ballyhoo about racial stereotyping, one might expect him to adopt a less hackneyed approach to his portrayals of Italians and women.
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You may begin to wonder if Lee really initiated this project or if it only fell into his hands after Roberto Benigni proved unavailable.
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20This is a sloppy stew in which the ingredients of battle action, murder mystery, little-kid sentiment and history lesson don't mix well.
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10Given 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.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 19 out of 28
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Mixed: 2 out of 28
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Negative: 7 out of 28
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