Much like the four soldiers at its center, there's a taut wartime thriller caught behind enemy lines in "Miracle at St. Anna." But unlike the African Americans pinned between German troops and the racist and incompetent Army they serve, the movie winds up a casualty of schmaltzy, patronizing sentiment on the one hand and overweening ambition on the other.

Directed by Spike Lee, "Miracle" is one of the most highly anticipated films of this season, in large part because it's the first major motion picture in recent memory to represent the experience of black soldiers in World War II.

That historical burden weighs heavily on Lee, who has made a film that seeks to do way too many things and winds up doing none of them well.

Based on the novel of the same name by James McBride, the movie follows four "Buffalo Soldiers" who find themselves in a remote Italian village surrounded by German troops: Staff Sgt. Stamps (Derek Luke), the upright stalwart who believes America is capable of change; Sgt. Cummings (Michael Ealy), the smooth-talking Lothario who harbors a far angrier pessimism; Cpl. Negron (Laz Alonso), who as a Puerto Rican doesn't consider himself part of the racial conversation; and Pfc. Train (Omar Benson Miller), a dimwitted gentle giant who has adopted a quiet Italian orphan named Angelo (Matteo Sciabordi) and who carries with him a piece of statuary that he's convinced makes him invisible and all-powerful.

Stranded, the men make their way to a village and find a woman named Renata (Valentina Cervi), who becomes the source of a rivalry between Stamps and Cummings. Just when the story seems to kick in as an absorbing cat-and-mouse game, Lee inexplicably changes focus, as often as not to a shot of Cervi removing her sweater.

The four soldiers never come into their own as characters, crowded out as they are by subplots and speechifying. Train is particularly problematic as an example of the "magical Negro" stereotype that has bedeviled movies from "The Green Mile" to "Million Dollar Baby."

Overwrought, overproduced, overbusy and overlong, "Miracle at St. Anna" finally suffers from the worst filmmaking sin of all: the failure of trust, in the story and the audience. And no miracle can overcome that.

-- Ann Hornaday (Sept. 26, 2008)

Contains strong war violence, profanity, sexual content and nudity.