It’s clear that Angelina Jolie doesn’t rank among America’s finest film directors. Which isn’t to say that her In the Land of Blood and Honey is a bad movie. It’s just an unremarkable and often gratingly manipulative one.

Scene after scene employs slow motion, or an amped-up score, or both, to do the heavy lifting of signaling to the audience that this is a moment during which you should feel something.

Jolie wants us to feel the horror that was the civil war that erupted in the Bosnia-Herzegovina region following the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Ethnic Serbs clashed with Muslims and Croatians over control of the territory. A policy of ethnic cleansing undertaken by the Serbs eventually led the international community to intervene, but not until untold atrocities had been committed.

In the Land of Blood and Honey aims to pack as many of these as possible into its two-hour running time. I’m imagining the elevator pitch for the script, which was written by Jolie, as “Romeo and Juliet meets Schindler’s List.”

At the center of the story are a Bosnian Serb soldier named Danijel (Goran Kostic) and a Muslim painter, Ajla (Zana Marjanovic), who have a romance that’s abruptly ended when war begins in 1992. The next time they see each other, Ajla has been rounded up by the Serbian army along with other Muslim women and imprisoned in a detention center of which Danijel is in charge.

Because of his feelings for her, he shields Ajla from some of the abuse and the repeated rapes to which the other prisoners are subjected. They renew their love affair. When Danijel learns that he is to be transferred to another army station and will no longer be able to protect her, he advises her on how she might escape.

Danijel and Ajla’s relationship is far more complicated that it appears at first, though at times the drama between them rings false. Danijel, especially, is a character the movie never gets a grip on. In some scenes, he seems a good man doing the best he can in a difficult situation, and at other moments he reminded me of Amon Goeth, the Nazi camp commandant chillingly portrayed by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List. I know the film intends to present Danijel as a complex, tortured man, but it’s a mistake of inconsistency to have him come off as quite so bipolar.

Jolie’s script does an admirable job of conveying the basic facts of the war, as the conflict continues over the course of a few years, without resorting to long monologues of exposition. I liked especially how Danijel’s father, a Serbian general, made reference to the roots of the conflict dating back centuries, to when Muslim invaders conquered and occupied the Balkan Peninsula. It further underlines the senselessness of the violence to know how much of it is the result of ancient animosities.

The film’s strength is a sense of authenticity, thanks in part to the choice to shoot it in the language of Bosnia-Herzegovina with actors from the country, and its understanding of the dynamics of the conflict. I wish then that Jolie had made a sprawling war epic rather than a film tightly focused on two characters and their tragic love story. It’s in dealing with the intimate moments that her work suffers.