Here is my first film review. Enjoy!
Spike Lee dropped the ball on this one. Hard. To call anything about this film a miracle would be lying. In fact, the only miracle I can think of is that I managed to stay in the theater the entire time (I did struggle to maintain consciousness, though). This two hour and forty minute behemoth certainly had enough time to make some very strong statements and, in an ideal world, could have connected the audience to its characters to an exceptional degree. Unfortunately for everyone involved, it did none of these things.
Basically, the bulk of the film takes place in WWII Italy, in a flashback of a veteran who commits a seemingly unprovoked murder in the film’s present. The story follows four black American soldiers who get cut off from the rest of their comrades (in one of the most puzzlingly extreme white demonizations ever put to film) and are forced to take shelter in a small Tuscan village, where they believe themselves surrounded by Nazi forces. Now, to say that this is the main plot of the film might not be entirely true – St. Anna has an incredible number of unnecessary side-plot and sub-plots, which, when the majority of our story is already flashback, end up serving only to convolute and hide the actual story. For the first two hours, I was consistently amazed at the introduction of more and more characters. Even past the point of super-saturation, we got more characters. In a style better suited for horror films, however, many of these characters were only introduced so that they could be killed off later in a grasp for emotional impact. Some of the sub-plots were absolutely nothing more than vessels for audience sympathy toward characters non-integral to the plot, so that their inevitable demise would (hopefully) carry emotional weight. Unfortunately, some of these textbook characters, such as the love interest who brought nothing but a very nice pair of breasts to the screen, were clearly pointless and thus felt more like bait than anything.
By the time the movie returned to its current-events setting, the “shocker” of an ending was already painfully obvious, and its excessive exposition dragged just as much as the rest of the film. The film was much too long. The actual content simply didn’t fill the epic war-movie format very well, and much of the film felt like filler. A flashback within a flashback is usually a bad sign from the start, and with no bearing on the trajectory of the plot, one can only guess at why the numerous pointless scenes were never cut in favor of a more reasonable-length feature. To be honest, though, even if it ran only an hour and a half, this movie would struggle to maintain interesting content. Far too much of the movie was composed of characters exchanging looks that said nothing and advanced nothing.
I would like to attempt to round this out with at least one positive comment, but am struggling to think of something truly noteworthy and good that this film brings forward. The acting ranged from abysmal to at-least-she’s-hot, and the dialogue was often laughably bad. Something tells me the phrase “Nigga please!” wasn’t exactly common parlance in the forties. Also, I would like an explanation of the purpose of the Nazi radio-woman? For about twenty minutes, she basically guides the actions and conversations of anyone who graces the screen, yet after that she is never referred to or used in any way again. Cut it! A few minutes of random characters’ thoughts on God (with no introduction, mind you, just a misplaced montage of deeper thoughts on religion)? Where’d that come from, and why? Cut! A heavy-handed commentary on racism through an ice-cream shop? Cut!! At twenty minutes, the plot might have sufficed as an entertaining and interesting short film. But at almost three hours, your time would be much better spent seeing anything else and regretting it for that extra hour. If, perhaps, Miracle at St. Anna had at least contained the aforementioned miracle, the film would have felt a bit more complete. No such luck.
