The latest Spike Lee movie triggers a yet-unexplored angle of the World War II, but critics unanimously say the movie fails in every way and that the director doesn’t deliver the otherwise beautiful story as it would deserve.

Based on James McBride’s 2002 novel, “Miracle at St. Anna” is a movie about the soldiers of the all-black 92nd Infantry, as they attempt to cross the Serchio River in Tuscany, back in 1944 in Italy, during the war. It shows how these men feel in an unfair war that isn’t really about them, but is highly intolerant and racist and about a country, theirs, in which they feel they don’t belong.

At one point, Staff Sgt. Aubrey Stamps, Derek Luke, character comments on feeling more free in Italy than he does back home. Nazi radio broadcaster Axis Sally, played by ethnic Romanian actress living in Germany Alexandra Maria Lara, deepens the feeling of segregation by saying “Why die for a nation that doesn't want you?"

The four main characters, part of the so-called Buffalo Soldiers, who survive crossing the river, while their fellows die in the attempt, find themselves behind enemy lines in the small Italian village of Colognora, hoping to be found and rescued by their army troop.

The characters’ story is supposed to bring to attention a rather delicate situation, the fact that, no matter how hard they tried, the black American soldiers were not treated as equals by their superiors and their fellow soldiers, but hated and mocked. Spike Lee manages to make them into stereotypes, thus transforming something that could have been new, thrilling and emotional into a been-there-done-that war story, making a complete mess out of McBride’s novel.

Sam Train (Omar Benson Miller) is, of course, the gentle giant, who saves and then befriends a small Italian boy that thinks of him as a huge chocolate man, this being the touch of sweetness in the movie, a contrast between the cruel war and the beautiful stories that sometimes occur in times like these.

Derek Luke (“Antwone Fisher") portrays the upstanding leader Staff Sgt. Aubrey Stamps, Michael Ealy ("Sleeper Cell") is the cynical and womanizing Bishop Cummings, while Laz Alonso’s character is Hector Negron, the movie’s link to the future, as the first scenes show his older version working in a postal office and taking a gun under the counter to shoot a man who just walked in, for reasons to be explained in the war flashback.

The prologue and epilogue, which both take place in the 1980s and involve the former soldier now postal worker turned into killer, were definitely unnecessary, as the movie is already too long and tedious and the overwhelming number of characters and subplots make the story lose its very essence.

Possibly a good story, with good performances from the actors, but really bad directing from Spike Lee. This is the critic’s verdict for “Miracle at St. Anna,” a movie with maybe an exciting trailer, but with three very long hours of torment for the courageous viewers.