Red Tails

Red Tails, directed by Anthony Hemmingway, is the tale (word play!) of the Tuskeegee Airmen, African-American fighter pilots, who during WWII overcame the racial bigotry of the era to become one of the most celebrated air squadrons of the war.  At the time, most of the Army Air Corps brass considered African-Americans unfit both mentally and physically to be effective aviators.  It literally took an act of Congress for the Air Corps to form an all-black aviation unit.  In an effort to limit the number of acceptable applicants, the Air Corps set the standard for application so incredibly high--higher than it had for white applicants to the Air Corps--that only the university educated or those with previous flight experience were eligible.  Proving the law of unintended consequences, this uber-stringent application process was a major contributing factor to the great success of the Tuskeegee Airmen.

It's a great story and one that deserved to be told.  It just deserved a better movie to tell it.

From the opening titles, Red Tails has the feel of a big-budget TV movie.  It's clear the filmmakers (George Lucas is the executive producer) weren't interested in making a heavy, super serious war movie, a la Saving Private Ryan, and were shooting for something like a throwback to old Hollywood war films.  But the end result falls short of homage and ends up more like ho-hum.  The movie is rife with every possible war movie cliche' imaginable and every downed German plane apparently must be accompanied with a (not so) witty quip.  Example of said quips:  "Take that Mr. Hitler!"  Yikes.

As a pseudo-historian myself, it drives me nuts when filmmakers load up historical dramas with recycled characitures and story lines, more so than in non-historical type films.  Usually, the reason someone wants to make a movie about a historical event is because there is already a great story in place.  And I can guarantee that the actual real life characters involved are a whole lot more interesting than the one-dimensional retread archetypes we've all seen 100 times.  So why add all the fluff?

Example:  not to be too spoilerish, but there are at least two events in Red Tails that are clearly set up just to elicit contrived emotional pay offs down the line.  One is the all too common love story; soldier falls in love with foreign beauty and keeps her picture pinned to his cockpit console.  Guess what happens?  In the other, a downed pilot is captured and locked up, Great Escape style.  Along with his new found compatriots, he escapes, also, in a stroke of creative genius, Great Escape style.  Whether he truly gets away or not is left ambiguous, until one of his fellow escapees arrives at the Tuskeegee base to present his commanding officer with the pilots dog tags.  Both of these plot lines resolve themselves in the last few minutes of the movie at opposite ends of the emotional spectrum, and if you've seen more than three movies in your lifetime, you should see the "payoffs" a mile away.

Another example that a great many war movies fall prey to--even good ones--is the cookie cutter cast of war movie characters.  Everyone in the unit has a role to play.  There's the funny guy, the religious guy, the rebel with a heart of gold, the flawed leader (usually a drinker), the one that plays a musical instrument.  Like I said, almost all war movies are guilty of this to some degree, though the good ones are able to add a little nuance within those stereotypes.  And don't even get me started on the scar-faced lead German pilot.  Why not just have Hitler himself flying point?

Ok, enough bashing.  The positives.  The dogfighting scenes are pretty cool.  When making the original Star Wars, George Lucas used actual combat footage of WWII dogfights as a model for the X-wing/Tie-fighter battles of the Death Star attack.  In Red Tails, the dogfights are very much like high-definition versions of those old combat movies and are fun to watch.  They would be even more fun without the corny pilot-to-pilot dialog...wait, this is the positives part of the review!  Uh, yeah, the dogfights are neat.

Also, as a big fan of The Wire, it was nice to see some familiar faces on the big screen, I just wish they had better material to work with.  If it was your first time seeing them in action you wouldn't know how good Tristan Wilds, Michael B. Jordan, and Andre Royo are in The Wire as Michael Lee, Wallace, and Bubbles respectively.

I suppose I should cover at least some of the plot.  The Tuskeegee Airmen, dismissed by their white superior officers as not fit for combat, are relegated to pedestrian patrols and small convoy raids far behind the front lines, and are itching for some real action.  Finally, after much intercession by their commanding officers (Terrance Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr.) the Red Tails (so called, because the tails of their planes are painted red) are given a chance to escort bombers on raids into enemy territory.  They distinguish themselves and soon earn the respect of the white bomber crews.  There's some tension between the flawed leader (Nate Parker) and the rebel with a heart of gold (David Oyelowo), and there's the aforementioned love story and Great Escape redux episodes, but it's a pretty straight forward story.

It's not that I didn't enjoy myself (and it helped that I only paid matinee prices) and seeing the dogfights on the big screen was cool, but the potential was there for a much better movie.  Even without being a heavy handed war drama, there is a good movie in this story, but unfortunately now that this territory has already been mined we're unlikely to see that movie anytime soon.