Producer and director Spike Lee gets religion in his overlong, overacted, overwrought Miracle at St. Anna, which mixes mysticism with Nazi apologia and puts it to an oppressive soundtrack. If this Disney movie is supposed to dramatize that the United States’ Army’s all-black 92nd Division Buffalo Soldiers of World War 2 were militarily proficient, it fails miserably. Led by Staff Sergeant Stamps as a lone voice of reason (Derek Luke in the war saga’s best performance), a band of soldiers find themselves stuck with a boy in an enemy village, where they make misjudgment after misjudgment—only to be saved by someone on the side of white supremacists. Musically and theatrically shouting over itself, Miracle at St. Anna, drawing a distinction between the SS and rank and file Nazi soldiers and officers, suggests that Nazis spared children, recited poetry and worried about the Geneva convention. The two hour, 40-minute Miracle also depicts black soldiers who are more concerned with getting laid and going to church than they are with staying alive, accomplishing their goal and finding a way back home. That a lone American Negro soldier is the recipient of a Nazi pardon puts this movie with Munich in granting moral equivalency to evil.
