Spike Lee’s latest flick, Miracle at St. Anna, is the equivalent of catnip for Oscar voters. There are long, languorous shots of Italian cities, heartfelt performances, gripping (and occasionally horrifying) war scenes. All of this, however, comes at the cost of one of the least imaginative movies Lee has ever created. It’s as if someone told him to make a parody of an Academy Award-winning war movie.

The story, written by James McBride from his own book, certainly sounds intriguing. In the 1980s, a black veteran named Hector Negron (Laz Alonso) kills a man in the middle of a post office. When the police go to his house, they discover a priceless Italian statue that was lost in WWII. Lee goes to great lengths to build up suspense around the statue, the murder and the rookie journalist out to get the story firsthand. This suspense, apparently, is all for nothing, as this part of the movie is nothing more than a cheesy and pointless framing device.

From this, there’s a flashback to Hector’s days in the war with other black infantryman. This motley crew includes Sam Train (Omar Benson Miller), a simple, gentle giant of a man; Bishop Cummings (Derek Luke), a crass yet endearing agitator; and Aubrey Stamps (Michael Ealey), a serious-minded romantic. Add in an adorable Italian orphan, a sexy Italian idealist and lots of scary Nazis, and you’ve got a cast of characters.

But there’s still a lot of value here. There’s a wonderful scene at the beginning in which Axis Sally — the German version of Tokyo Rose — tempts, over loudspeakers, the soldiers approaching the front lines. She does this with lustful promises of sex, fried chicken and – perhaps most appealingly – the idea of a country without the tumultuous U.S. civil rights history. Near the end, too, there are some truly heartbreaking and brutal moments.

But as a whole, the movie is long and muddled. It’s a shame that Spike Lee, one of the few truly original voices in modern American cinema, has created a film that any hack could have spit out.