Laudable 'Red Tails' misses its target
In “Red Tails,” the famed Tuskegee Airmen get the John Wayne-style heroic rendering they very much deserve, but in a hackneyed and weirdly context-less story that does them a disservice.
Long a pet project of his, George Lucas self-financed the film and has said he hopes “Red Tails” will prove there's an audience for all-black movies. That's a laudable goal, but “Red Tails” reduces a historical story of deep cultural significance to merely a flyboy flick.
Instead of creating something authentic and new, “Red Tails” superimposes the tale of the black World War II pilots on a dated, white genre of 1940s patriotic propaganda. “Red Tails” is blatantly old-fashioned, just with a change in color.
“Red Tails” opens in the midst of an aerial dog fight while the credits are still rolling. Director Anthony Hemingway plunges right into the action, skipping all that pesky backstory of black men braving the segregation of Jim Crowe America and, against the odds, rising up at the Tuskegee Institute.
Cuba Gooding Jr. is here as the pipe-chomping Maj. Emanuelle Stance. The other higher-up with him is Col. A.J. Bullard, played with unnatural speech by Terrence Howard.
The film is centered, though, on the pilots of the 332nd Fighter Group, which earned the nickname of Red Tails from the painted ends of their P-47 fighters. These first black military aviators in the U.S. armed forces flew more than 150,000 sorties over Europe and North Africa during WWII, often escorting Allied bombers. Sixty-six were killed in action.
Their bravery helped persuade President Harry S. Truman to desegregate the military in 1948. Some 300 of them are still alive, and most, by invitation, attended President Barack Obama's inauguration.
Our group of thinly sketched pilots all come with cliché nicknames: Joe “Lightning” Little (David Oyelowo), Marty “Easy” Julian (Nate Parker), Ray “Junior” Gannon (Tristan Wilds), Andrew “Smoky” Salem (Ne-Yo), Maurice “Bumps” Wilson (Michael B. Jordan) and Samuel “Joker” George (Elijah Kelly).
The biggest flaw here is the corny script by John Ridley and Aaron McGruder, the Boondocks cartoonist. There's a fine, swaggering vibe, but a curious hesitance to really tell the Tuskegee story. Half of their two-front war (at home and in battle) goes largely without depiction, except for one or two minor scrapes with racist officers.
The whole thing is unrealistically sunny, both literally and metaphorically. The skies are always bright blue (better for highlighting the digital trickery) and hardly anyone dies. Though this is a film about one of the most violent clashes in history, little seems at risk. The racist generals (Bryan Cranston makes a cameo as one) are back in Washington. The German fighters are cartoonishly evil.
“Red Tails” might smother the Tuskegee Airmen in the tropes of old Hollywood, but there's still inspiration to be found in seeing those tropes acted out with goodwill and fresh faces.
TITLE: “Red Tails”CAST: Nate Parker, David Oyelowo, Cuba Gooding Jr., Terrence Howard, Bryan Cranston, Ne-YoDIRECTOR: Anthony HemingwayRATED: PG-13 for some sequences of war violenceGRADE: * * (out of 5)
