After acclaimed character dramas such as Malcolm X, Do the Right Thing and the gratifyingly tense Inside Man, Spike Lee's takes on a big, full-on war picture. Lee's "Miracle at St. Anna" is easily his most technically ambitious film. Focusing on the African-American soldiers who fought in the U.S. armed forces during World War II, this is certainly a movie with a monumental mission. Sadly, Lee’s finished product, at two hours and 40 minutes, is not just unjustifiably overlong but also muddled and diffuse. It's a worthy effort, at times moving, at others disjointed.

Based on a 2002 novel by James McBride, who also wrote the screenplay, Miracle at St. Anna tells of the men of the 92nd Infantry Division, black troops who served in Italy during World War II and were known as Buffalo Soldiers. By following four soldiers trapped behind enemy lines in Tuscany (Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso and Omar Benson Miller), Lee jumps from visceral battle scenes to intimate drama to lighthearted comedy.

The story is framed in a flashback. It's 1983, where we see New York postal clerk Hector shoot a customer he seems to recognize from long ago. Hector's arrested, but he won't talk. But a cub reporter (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) discovers a priceless statue head in the man's closet: the head of a statue that once adorned a bridge in Florence that was wrecked by bombs during World War II.

A jaded cop ( John Turturro) and the reporter try to figure it all out. They don't, but a flashback lets us in on the scoop. The subsequent flashback scenes, in the only full-on battle we'll see, the buffalo soldiers slosh through a Tuscan river while a Nazi truck blasts the voice of Axis Sally, the German counterpart of Tokyo Rose, to entice them to surrender. Here, and in the following scenes wherein the Nazis machine-gun an entire village, Lee shows the shocking reality of war by shoving the horrors in our face.