Esquadrão Red Tails

For 24 years, George Lucas has been developing a film about the Tuskegee Airmen, the all African American squad of army pilots during World War II. Now, the dream has come true and the final result of "Red Tails" is a too long, tedious, all noise and no heart time killer. It makes one yearn for the memories of Lucas's "Star Wars" and "Indiana Jones".

In 1944 Italy, a group of four army pilots has been summoned to protect bombers over Germany. Along the way, they have encounters with friendship, romance, danger and overcoming death.

The film's director, Anthony Hemingway should have stuck to directing TV shows before filming this lackluster effort. John Ridley and Aaron McGruber's script feels third rate and mostly shifts into territories of melodrama and clichés. They should have taken out the bad subplot involving a romance between an Italian girl and one of the pilots and remained focused to expand on the story of the Airmen. The art direction looks like it's been borrowed from too many movies and the action sequences fails to generate any thrills. The visual effects from Industrial Light and Magic add no excitement to the action.

The young actors playing the pilots {David Oyelowo, Nate Parker, Tristan Wilds and Elijah Kelly} and the acting veterans {Cuba Gooding Jr. and Terrence Howard} feel like they're taking their roles forcefully instead of seriously. Both Gooding Jr. and Howard proved one thing in their respective roles: They were both in the film just for the money.

All in all, this fails both in entertainment and as a history lesson. For the past four decades, Lucas wowed audiences by showing them how movies can take people to brand new worlds with "Star Wars" and "Indy". Now, this time, he has failed. Both Lucas and the Tuskegee Airmen deserved better.

In the end, the best thing to come out of this is the thing before the film itself. The "thing" that I'm talking about is the trailer for the upcoming and hopefully very funny "Three Stooges" movie.

Rating: 1 star

This film opens with a CGI aerial battle that is literally of the quality I would expect from a direct-to-DVD film by a company like The Asylum. It's shockingly embarrassing for a theatrical release with a $58 million budget. Even the font used in the titles smells like a no budget film. It does get better than this, but not as much as it should. Explosions are all CGI and don't look like they exist in the same plane as the physical objects. Oddly, every German pilot in this film appears to be exactly the same person. Effects aside, this film is intended to play more like a 1950's era war movie than a modern one. That's a valid choice, but it doesn't play like a good one. The story is, on the face of it, an interesting one, but the narrative strokes are so unbelievably broad that the film really doesn't progress after the basic plot setup is done. Some of the actors do a pretty fine job given the one dimensionality of their characters (David Oyelowo is particularly good), but they have precious little to work with.

I actually saw a matinée of Red Tails today.

I'm not saying that any paid critic or anyone on this board is a moron, or that people steeped in World War II historical facts will like it, or even that those few who hate the original Star Wars Trilogy will somehow flip their taste and enjoy Red Tails. But. . .

Simply to represent those who actually saw the film, here is my two cents for and have the capacity to appreciate it. This is not the dry historical reportage that some people prefer. It pushes buttons, gets emotional reactions and laughs that it earns, and it was worth the wait. I remember talk of this project from the good old days when there were only great Star Wars features and no Prequel duds.

No disservice had been done to the story of these airmen. Though nothing feels left out and it doesn't feel especially episodic (a curse of most reality-based movies), nothing rings especially false. It is a genre movie: war flick. Racism is touched upon and shown to be ignorant, respect is given to the Red tails, and the tragedy that you expect actually can happen so even when there is fun there is the spectre of danger.

After enjoying this movie, many people may begin to study the historical details with this movie as a sort of primer. Be reassured that none of the characters bump into Young Indiana Jones. But also make no mistake, the pacing is good, the dogfights are cool, and it is a movie. There is no time wasted on languid ambiguous lulls onto which we can impose deep artistic intent. There is one high note that feels a bit forced because it is not explained and its timing seems like too much of a shift within a scene (I won't say where it occurs, but it's the one time I felt the hand of the adaptor squeezing something into the wrong setting). There is one piece of score over one scene, reprised part way into the end credits, that is borderline as to whether it should be included. The percussion feels programmed. The rest of the score is appropriate orchestra stuff generic enough that I didn't notice it, so it must have fit. Critic Richard Crouse said he thought because Lucas was involved, the pilots talk about women during battle instead of having just the task at hand in mind. So I was definitely listening for this. The fact it they do NOT chit-chat about a woman during BATTLE. Only bored on patrol BEFORE spotting a target, and AFTER a battle. I would not take points off for a character touching his girlfriend's photo, or a comic relief character trying to get good mojo from "Black Jesus." I thought those moments were fitting and appropriate, whether or not they are clichés. One character admonishes the believer with a paraphrased Han Solo line and another says that the new fighter looks like it is speeding while standing still (paraphrasing an off-camera Lucas line from Tucker: A Man and His Dream). But other than that the grimy fingerprints of the disgraced post Phantom Menace maverick are not evident. The ILM special effects didn't seem especially fake to me, even though they must have been, and even the non-famous members of the cast are delivered and memorable whether we remember their names or not. Good show.

I want to start by saying that I had a great big smile on my face before the film even started. For this to be the opening showing on Friday afternoon, there was a pretty decent crowd. And virtually every adult coming to see the film had young people in tow. I was also thrilled to see the diversity of the film-goers. We've come a long way since The Color Purple. I guess the first thing I want to do is to give props to the director of this film, Anthony Hemingway. You might remember him from such brilliant films as Changing Lanes, ALI and The Manchurian Candidate. He definitely kept on track with Red Tails. Although most (some) of us know the story behind the Tuskegee training program during World War II, Hemingway brought the story closer than ever. This does not detract from The Tuskegee Airmen film made back in 1995 starring Laurence Fishburne and Allen Payne, which was also brilliant. Now, on to the cast…… Howard and Cuba and Nate….. oh my!!!! I am not sure if the writing was brilliant or not, but I thought that the acting was exceptional. Terrence Howard (Colonel A.J. Bullard) took the reins by getting his troops the credibility they deserved. Cuba Gooding Junior (Major Emanuelle Stance) maneuvered his company through the never ending red tape that came with war back in 1944. Nate Parker (Marty "Easy" Julian) took the lead in this amazing cast of actors. I could go on naming cast members for another 2 or 3 hundred words, but I won't. The one thing that I will say is that it was nice to see Nate Parker and Tristan Wilds (Ray "Junior" George) reunite again after their appearance in The Secret Life of Bees. I know what you're thinking…… "Aren't you the same person who hates biopics?" The answer is "yes, I am". However, it is so difficult to get gripping stories about minorities (any minority) on to the big screen that I have to rejoice when it happens. Finally, I want to say that I had another smile on my face when at the end of the film, the audience applauded. I definitely think that this film is worth the price of a ticket, so I say fasten your seat belts and hop into the cockpit and go and see this film. All engines are "Go" with a green light.

Among the many problems I had with Red Tails, I suppose one of the most egregious was the incredibly overbearing and cloying musical score. But in a rather sad way, the score perfectly fits the entirely forced and artificial nature of the movie itself. Now, I know that typically a film's musical score is used to enhance emotion, but in the case of Red Tails, the music is so over-the-top, in-your-face, and cliché ridden that I couldn't help but laugh at times. One example is the music we hear when a soldier drives into an Italian town. Yes, we know we're in Italy, but in case anyone is confused we're treated to a musical cue that sounds like the spaghetti scene from Lady and the Tramp. And if you can't figure out that the German pilot is a bad guy, why, the music will certainly tell you! Well, that and the GIGANTIC SCAR ON HIS German FACE!

And I'm sure I'll be called a pinko/commie for saying this, but what was up with playing America the Beautiful during the credits? It felt so forced, like the music in one of those "patriotic" animatronic exhibits at Disneyland that gets mocked. And the reason those are mocked is because they are lifeless objects trying to manipulate and force us to feel something without actually LETTING us feel that way on our own. It's cynical trickery. And that's how I feel about the score of Red Tails and pretty much the movie in general.

The men of the 332nd were heroes and patriots. Real ones. But they were also real men, not the cartoon characters in Red Tails. And the Tuskegee Airmen deserve better than the childish fantasy of George Lucas by way of Anthony Hemingway.