For those of you who have heard the stories of how much of RED TAILS executive producer George Lucas may or may not have directed/re-shot personally, try to put such thoughts out of your head as you attempt to watch this story of the first-ever squadron of African-American pilots to fly in combat. It's better if you hate this film on its own merits rather than because Lucas may have pushed aside credited director Anthony Hemingway and put his hands all over this worthy story, turning it into a horribly written, trite adventure film that cares more about aerial battles than it does about telling the glorious but often heartbreaking account of the segregated Tuskegee airmen of World War II.
I'm not going to get bogged down by history; my feeling has always been that if a "based on a true story" movie is engaging and entertaining, I don't really care how much it sticks to the facts. It's not a damn documentary, and it doesn't pretend to be. No, the problem that I had with RED TAILS is that it's addicted to war cliches, despite the fact that the Tuskegee men had a military career that was far from cliche. I will admit that the beginning of the film is the most interesting, as screenwriters John Ridley and Aaron McGruder detail the way the Army Air Corps systematically kept the black pilots from doing anything other than routine coastal patrols of areas where the enemy hadn't been seen in weeks or months in planes that were equivalent to hand-me-downs from white pilots. The frustration felt by the men is palpable and well earned, and the scenes that illustrate that are the film's best.
But with Lucas and fellow Star Wars producer Rick McCallum guiding the ship, what RED TAILS really cares about are the aerial battles, which occur only as a last-ditch effort when the Army Air Corps loses too many bombers when their escort fighters stop protecting them to chase glory by shooting down enemy planes rather than sticking next to the bombers. It's a fascinating bit of history that is kind of glossed over, but the Red Tails (named for the red tails painted on their planes) are called in and told to stick by the bombers, which they do. They still manage to knock down a few enemies on their first mission, as well as keep a single bomber from getting hit. Make no mistake, as much as you may hate the rest of the film, the aerial sequences are pretty spectacular, and we can end that discussion here.
Trouble enters the picture when the film attempts to get to know the pilots, or more specifically, when the film lays out one military "type" after another and pretends that equals character development. First on the list of offenders is Cuba Gooding Jr. as the pipe-chomping Maj. Emanuelle Stance, who delivers speech after motivating speech to the men, to surprisingly little results. They pretty much only listen to each other or the true commanding officer of the squad Col. A.J. Bullard (Terrence Howard), who is ultimately the one that gets the Red Tails their first shot at actual combat after defying the openly racist Maj. Mortamus (Bryan Cranston). Every sentence that comes out of Bullard's mouth could be plastered on a motivational poster. He doesn't seem to think or express himself in anything other than noble thoughts. That said, his open defiance of those who would dismiss him and his men would seem to make him a character worth knowing. Alas, he is barely in the movie.
The actual fighters are saddled with nicknames (as was the practice, I get that) and given a type. There's the rebellious pilot who defies his squadron leader if he sees an opportunity; there's the lover boy who woos a pretty Italian woman in a village near the base; there's the guy with the funny voice who is quick with a joke; there are the hardened repair crew members; hell, there's even a guy with a drinking problem. And you've got some strong actors playing these parts, such as Michael B. Jordan, Tristan Wilds, Nate Parker, Elijah Kelley, Andre Royo, and David Oyelowo, as well as musicians Ne-Yo and Method man filling out the roster, and not a one can really rise above the atrocious dialogue. By the time the film is over, you will hate Ne-Yo's character Smoky as much as you did Jar Jar Binks because they're cut from the same stereotypical cloth.
And even if some of the almost unbelievable moments in RED TAILS are more or less true, they feel utterly false. There's a moment when the black pilots are invited into a whites-only officers club for drinks, not long after one Red Tail was beaten severely in the same establishment, and the whole place embraces them as equals--after one successful mission. Sorry, guys, I'm not buying it. And it should come as no surprise that the in-the-air dialogue isn't much better. "How you like that, Mr. Hitler?!" may go down as the "Release the Kraken!" of 2012. And no, not even a moving score by Terrence Blanchard saves any part of Red Tails, nor do the aforementioned aerial effects sequences, which are shot almost exactly like every X-Wing battle in a STAR WARS movie.
The bottom line is that RED TAILS fails every time a character opens his mouth. There's a love story that bogs down the movie, a resoundingly dumb focus by the airmen on one particular German fighter pilot (nicknamed Pretty-Boy and played by Lars van Riesen), and an unexplainable commitment to having these men spout useless, predictable words as if their lives depended on it. I'll admit, I don't remember much about HBO's 1995 film THE TUSKEEGEE AIRMEN, starring Laurence Fishburne (and a much younger Cuba Gooding Jr.), but I remember it being a whole lot better than RED TAILS. Come to think of it, I liked my last root canal more than Red Tails. If you want to pay tribute to these great men, buy a book that accurately and affectionately details their true story rather than give money to anyone for producing this drivel.
