Technically, Miracle at St. Anna is a Spike Lee joint, but it could just as well be called Another Great American War Epic. Or The Black Saving Private Ryan. Ostensibly inspired by black platoons in WWII, the ill-trained African-American soldiers dodge loads of bullets and stuff, but minus the deep-fried Southern ebonics, you'd be hard-pressed to tell their hijinks apart from any of their white Hollywood counterparts. Which is of course disappointing.

The unlikely hero, Sam Train (Omar Benson Miller), is nicknamed, variously, "Sniper Bait" (because he's fat) and "The Chocolate Giant" (because he's black). There are lots of nicknames! Character types, too: Stamps (Derek Luke) is the quiet leader; Hector (Laz Alonso) is the Puerto Rican; and Bishop (Michael Ealy) is the light-skinned playboy. They're abandoned by their platoon in Nazi-occupied Italy, where Train rescues a young white boy (Matteo Sciabordi) and recovers a mysterious Florentine artifact that, years later, uncovers the tragic story of where the boy came from and how his family died. Feels a little bit like a screenplay-generating software program is at work, no?

Lee seems to be remaking every WWII movie he's seen. Set in an extended flashback, the troops become unwitting guardian angels over the town they stumble upon and suffer the contempt of both Europeans and the American commanders they come between. The best scenes push the two races uncomfortably close together—the boy says Train's finger "doesn't taste like chocolate," and a liberal young Italian woman (Valentina Cervi) has sex with Bishop just to see what it's like. But Lee isn't much for geopolitics, and when the story veers into an out-of-left-field, faith-based subplot straight out of We Were Soldiers, he sadly breaks out hammy lines like, "How could God let this happen?"

In its own bland way, James McBride's screenplay (adapted from his own book) is even less subtle than Lee's usual brand of racial provocation. A white commander calls his second-in-command an "uppity negro." The black soldier then spits in his boss's water jug and calls him a "stupid white man." It'd be nice to think McBride and Lee are trying to allude to the way Barack Obama's intelligence is automatically equated with "elitism," but McBride's uncomplicated view of racism (mostly shouting and spitting) is the kind only Paul Haggis could truly appreciate.

Oh, and there's blood. Lots of it. Even though there's very little to do with war itself, Lee holds shots of limbless soldiers and open wounds, using gore as a crutch to fall back on—like those pesky blackface scenes in Bamboozled!, they're more shock device than anything else. From the opening shot of someone's head splattered against a bank teller's window, violence is everywhere and seemingly unmotivated—a lot of gunshots and explosions that tell you, yes, war sucks, and being black in war sucks even more, because the damn Eye-talians already hate you enough for being American.

And that's pretty much the take-home point—this is just another combat flick. All that's missing in the end is the epilogue text about how each soldier died, which medals he won, and where he was buried. Yeah, that's right, the story is fiction, not history—but then why does it all feel so damn tedious?