RED TAILS – The Review

RED TAILS seems to be a Hollywood war movie on its surface, but it offers much more than the expected action sequences. It’s the story of The Tuskegee Airmen, a group of black pilots who fought in World War II as part of a Fighter and Bombardment escort Group of the U.S. Army Air Corps. At the time, the American military was racially segregated and these black soldiers were subject to much discrimination, both within and outside the army. Before President Truman integrated the armed forces, black pilots were given the most rundown planes (“from Uncle Sam’s junkyard”), the fewest promotions, and the most dangerous (or boring) assignments. Despite these adversities, they trained and flew with distinction. Throughout the course of the RED TAILS they must overcome not only the racism, but also conflicts in their own trust and tragic losses amongst friends. It’s square, old-fashioned melodramatic entertainment to be dure, but is it good? Put simply, RED TAILS is worth seeing for its astonishing special effects sequences alone – the aerial battles achieved using a mixture of replica planes and seamless CGI imagery are excitingly staged and nothing short of spectacular. It’s when the film is grounded, which is way too often, that the film fumbles.
Set in Italy near the end of the war, RED TAILS focuses on a handful of the members of 332nd fighter group. Front and center are life-long friends Marty “Easy” Julian (Nate Parker), the hard-drinking squadron leader and reckless daredevil Joe “Lightning” Little played by David Oyelowo (all the flyers have nicknames). Then there’s Major Stance (Cuba Gooding Jr.) who doesn’t get to fly but does get to smoke a pipe and make a lot of motivating speeches and Colonel Bullard (Terrence Howrad) who doesn’t fly either but does get to show up his superior office (Bryan Cranston) who’s constantly expressing doubts that black (or “negro”, as they prefer to be called here) fliers are capable of operating aircrafts, following orders, or much else. The supporting cast includes Method Man as the guitar-picking pilot Sticks, Leslie Odom as Winky who has a funny voice, and Tristan Wilds as “Junior”, a baby-face pilot who hates his nickname and may or may not be ready for battle

Way too much of RED TAILS is spent on an unlikely romance between Lightning and Sophia, a gorgeous Italian resident of the picture-perfect villa near their base that develops after he spots her hanging clothes on her roof. It’s dubious that when Lightning enters a white officers’ club, he’s immediately called the ‘N-Word’, yet when he and Sophia walk in the open hand-in-hand expressing their love for each other (though they don’t speak the same language), not a head turns. This overvisited, underwritten love story is the least successful aspect of the film. Less time is given to an 11th hour subplot where Junior is shot down, captured, sent to a Nazi POW camp, digs a tunnel, and escapes, an mini-adventure given maybe five minutes of screen time.

But then the cast and the conventional, humdrum narrative isn’t the real draw of RED TAILS. The planes – and the resultant close-quarter, high-flying carnage- is the main selling point and it’s where RED TAILS soars. The myriad computer-generated dogfights are very well choreographed and rendered, and all of the tactics and flight movements seemed very realistic. I especially liked when the pilots exchanged menacing glares at the Germans, or (so it seems) one German in particular, a nasty, scarfaced devil nicknamed “Pretty Boy” (even the villains have nicknames!) who gets the films juiciest (subtitled) lines: “Show no mercy!” (yeah, that’s a problem with movie Nazis – they show too much mercy!) and my favorite: “Die, you foolish Africans!”. It’s the action scenes that have the realism and the energy that the rest of RED TAILS lacks and they are the only reason to recommend the film.

RED TAILS is produced by George Lucas’ Lucasfilms and it’s the first movie made by this studio since 1994′s RADIOLAND MURDERS which doesn’t involve either the Star Wars or Indiana Jones franchises. Lucas claims he has long tried to make this film and griped on the Daily Show that he had trouble finding a distributor because of…..(you guessed it) ….Hollywood RACISM! (this from the guy who created Jar Jar Binks). Tyler Perry or the producers of THE HELP may disagree but RED TAILS is an expensive-looking film, the story’s been filmed before(HBO’s THE TUSKEGEE AIRMEN in 1995) and it’s not particularly good, so if it bombs, Hollywood will be even less likely to invest in big pictures with all-black casts. Lucas, who has pledged that this will be his last motion picture, claims “I’m making a movie about Heroes not a movie about Victims”, yet he misses the irony in portraying himself as one.

3 of 5 Stars