Miracle At St. Anna, if you weren’t already aware, is essentially Spike Lee’s gigantic upraised middle finger to the war movie genre, which he believes is fundamentally underrepresented by African-American actors.  And you’ll actually see that evidenced in the first five minutes.  Of course, the question is, is the movie itself any good?  Let’s find out.

Miracle At St. Anna is about a post office clerk who, for no clear reason, shoots a guy in the middle of a busy pre-Christmas rush day.  And things only get stranger when police discover that, contained in the post office clerk’s apartment, is the missing head of one of the rarest statues in Italy.

Finding out the reason behind this chain of preposterous events will take about two and a half hours and be told via flashback.

First off, apparently, there’s quite a bit of contention as to just how true the events you see in this film actually are.  The irony here is that the Italians who were around at the time are the ones protesting, whilst Spike Lee is convinced that HE got it right.

However, despite the differences in accuracy, Miracle At St. Anna is actually a pretty entertaining and fairly well done war movie.  It definitely beats The Green Berets, and that’s saying something.  Oh, sure, it’s no Heartbreak Ridge or Saving Private Ryan but it’s still passable.

There’s a lot to like about the fairly well put together Miracle at St. Anna, even if most of the white people in this movie are portrayed as racist or evil or both.  There’s plenty of action, solid military maneuver, and some extra bits that you might never have seen before to make it extra fun.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, meanwhile, hands Miracle at St. Anna a seven out of ten for being a pretty good war movie, even if it’s affected by bad history and worse politics.