The heavy-handed touch of Angelina Jolie’s directorial debut, “In the Land of Blood and Honey,” is evident right from the start, when a bomb explodes in a nightclub before our main characters, out on a date, have even shared a word. Throughout the film, Jolie puts politics ahead of story and character, blatantly imposing a message — an altruist message, but a message nonetheless — on the film. And the result is a movie whose narrative feels like a fictionalized United Nations presentation.

Certainly, Jolie’s bluntness is justifiable. The film, in Bosnian with subtitles, is about the Bosnian War of the early 1990s and the atrocities of genocide that came with it, conducted by the Bosnian Serb Army in an ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims.