“Days of Glory” isn’t horrible by any means, but it is too cliché to be anything magnificent.

The film follows four North African men who join the French army to liberate France from Nazi occupation. But their German opponents aren’t the only dangers they encounter, as they field discrimination within their own ranks from the French soldiers.

The film plays out like a foreign “Glory” that is set in WWII instead of the Civil War. Many scenes are so similar to “Glory” that seeing Matthew Broderick or Morgan Freeman run through the background wouldn’t even feel out of place. At other points, it looks as though “Forrest Gump” may have been the inspiration for the way some scenes are constructed and played out.

And as the characters travel across Europe, they seem to meet up not only with Nazis for some lackluster battle scenes, but with every war film cliché imaginable. Yes, there is the man who carries a picture of his wife around and looks at it every chance he gets. Yes, there is the slightly less intelligent soldier everyone bands around to make smarter. Yes, there is the soldier who falls in love with a girl in the town the army is just passing through. Yes, there is the slow-motion sequences when the bullets start flying. And imagine the surprise that comes when the film’s climactic battle ends at, you guessed it, a bridge.

Clichés are never good, but they aren’t necessarily hard to overcome, either. Simply providing the film with some interesting characters would make everything else tolerable. But the characters in “Days of Glory” aren’t given enough time to develop individually to the point that the viewer cares about what happens to them. The film even has a set of brothers, which basically indicates it couldn’t come up with a better way to earn empathy from the viewer than to basically force the viewer to care about the family ties.

Perhaps the film fails because of what it could have been. Despite the fact that discrimination in the army is nothing new, the story of the French discriminating against North Africans is. But instead of making the film in such a way that would make the atrocities register with the viewers, it ends up being constructed like a boring history lesson.

“Days of Glory” was nominated for the 2007 Foreign Language Film Oscar, which can only be attributed to the year’s lack of competition. And let’s face it, war films will always get the sentimental vote. But looking at the film critically, it’s hard to imagine even the most sheltered viewer not having a sense of déj… vu watching it unfold.