In Spike Lee's long and eclectic career, "Miracle at St. Anna" is easily his most technically ambitious film.

But he might not have been ready for the enormity of such a project. "Miracle at St. Anna" is wildly unfocused in terms of tone and, at two hours and 40 minutes, it is unjustifiably overlong.

"Miracle" tells of the men of the 92nd Infantry Division, black troops who served in Italy during World War II. Lee has long been critical of films about the war such as Clint Eastwood's "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters From Iwo Jima" for depicting only the white soldiers who fought. This is his response — voluminous and full of unmistakable anger.

That's not the only emotion that emerges. In 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.

Regardless of the situation, though, he smothers everything, as usual, in the distractingly horn-heavy score of his longtime collaborator, composer and jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard. Since this is one of his preferred tactics, Lee obviously isn't interested in hearing that he undermines himself with such bombast at every turn.

Beginning in 1983 New York, but mostly told in flashback, "Miracle at St. Anna" follows the earnest leader Staff Sgt. Aubrey Stamps (Luke), smooth-talking Sgt. Bishop Cummings (Ealy), Puerto Rican translator Cpl. Hector Negron (Alonso) and the sweet, lumbering Private First Class Sam Train (Miller). They're sent to cross the Serchio River and not expected to make it — they're meant to get blown up to ferret out the enemy. But once they do survive, they take in an injured boy (Matteo Sciabordi) and hide out in a Tuscan village, where the locals are initially wary of these heavily armed Americans but slowly warm to them.

Somewhere along the way, Train picked up a piece of a demolished bridge: a woman's head made of stone, which he totes everywhere because he swears it's good luck. We've glimpsed the head at the start of the film, hidden in a bag at the bottom of someone's closet, and part of the point of "Miracle" is uncovering the mystery of its meaning.

The other mystery, though, comes as the young moppet Angelo, who seems to have a saintly quality about him. With his innocent disposition, he forges an unlikely bond with Train, whom he refers to as "the chocolate giant," even though he speaks no English and the big guy speaks no Italian.

Their relationship, in theory, could have been painfully maudlin ("I ain't never been this close to a white person before," Train admits to his buddies); turns out, it's a much needed source of warmth, and one of the few elements Lee gets just right.