Historical Red Tails Doesn’t Achieve Liftoff
The 332nd Fighter Group is based out of Ramitelli Airfield in Italy. It is 1944, and the all-Black squadron of Tuskegee Airmen have been relegated to surveying runs and tasked with blowing up German trucks and trains. The higher brass in Washington doesn’t believe them capable of taking on real missions, of having the skills to engage enemy fighters in real combat, a fact that drives aviators Joe ‘Lightening’ Little (David Oyelowo) and group leader Marty ‘Easy’ Julian (Nate Parker) crazy.
Terrance Howard and Cuba Gooding, Jr. in Red Tails © 20th Century Fox
But Captain A.J. Bullard (Terence Howard) refuses to allow his men to belittled or undervalued. Through his unceasing efforts, he’s gotten them their first major engagement lending air support to an important landing on a German-held beach. Major Emanuelle Stance (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) understands the importance of this mission, gets what will happen to his men if the fail. But Easy, Lightening and all the rest of the fighter pilots aren’t about to take things for granted, intent on proving once and for all Black aviators are every bit as suitable for combat as their White counterparts.
Good intentions only get you so far, and while producer George Lucas’ heart is definitely in the right place that doesn’t make his WWII aerial extravaganza Red Tails any less of a middling disappointment. Not a failure, mind you, there are moments too powerful and kinetically exciting for that to be the case, but a disappointment nonetheless. The movie can’t help but pale when compared to the 1995 HBO flick The Tuskegee Airmen, but it also pales in comparison to pictures from the middle to late 1940’s its stylistically most reminiscent of. The film feels stylistically freeze-dried, and for all the razzle, all the expensive CGI dazzle, the final product is nothing more than an emotionally empty pictograph filled for too much to the brim with melodramatic cliché.
It’s John Ridley (Three Kings) and Aaron McGruder’s (Boondocks) script where the majority of the problems lie. Everything here is far too familiar, far too simplistic. There aren’t any surprises, no nuances, the dramatic intensity of the situation and of the story diluted by the over familiarity of the characters and the situations. Everyone is a WWII archetype, not a fully formed flesh and blood figure, figuring out who lives and dies way too easy. From the first few moments I knew what was going to happen to Easy and to Lightening, knew how their stories were going to turn out. There weren’t any surprises to be found at any point inside this story, and the moment a character urges another to medically clear him or offers a beautiful Italian woman his hand in marriage it’s immediately clear what is going to happen next.
It also doesn’t help that, while Parker and Oyelowo do their best, both actors are stranded playing characters so one-dimensional I’m not sure anyone at all could have brought them to life in ways that would have mattered. Their respective stories are so silly, so brazenly maudlin, they almost belittle the heroic characters they are supposed to be honoring. By breaking things down to such simplistic generalities Ridley and McGruder have eroded the story’s heart and damaged its soul, making the uplifting heroics of what they and their fellow aviators accomplished slightly hollow in the process.
Howard and Gooding have a few shining moments, both basically doing their best Spencer Tracy and Cary Grant impersonations in many respects, and there are a couple of shocking moments of abject honesty that caught me by surprise. On top of that, the money Lucas spent on the production is definitely up there upon the screen for all to see, and while the aerial battles are CGI generated they’re still visually spectacular and it’s extremely hard not to come away impressed by the lot of them.
Director Anthony Hemingway is most known for handling crackerjack HBO productions like “The Wire” and “Tremé,” and he does manage to bring a stripped-down authenticity to some of the more intimate sequences that’s quite pleasing. But unlike its characters the movie itself never manages to take flight, never achieves a kinetic velocity that could help make it worthwhile. As a history lesson, Red Tails simply doesn’t rise to the occasion, and while bits and pieces are adequate on the whole this is one flight into the wild blue yonder that sadly never achieves liftoff.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
Additional Links
