Red Tails is a
creaky, rickety World War II movie. Those are hardly rare, but what makes this
one especially disappointing is the way it dives headfirst into one aspect of
the war that is too rarely considered and then finds nothing new to say about
it, or even entertaining ways to say the old things. The film concerns itself
with telling the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, an all black squadron of fighter
pilots during a time in which the official policy of the United States Army was
that African Americans were unfit for combat based on nothing more than the
color of their skin.
The film starts with the Airmen flying mostly peaceful
patrols far from the front lines. They’re not allowed in situations for which
dogfights might be a necessity, which means they’re denied the chance to go
wing-to-wing with German fighters. They’re getting antsy. We meet a handful of
the pilots, our ensemble of protagonists, each with their own snappy nickname.
There’s Easy (Nate Parker), Lightning (David Oyelowo), Ray Gun (Tristan Wilds),
Winky (Leslie Odom Jr.), Neon (Kevin Phillips), Sticks (Cliff Smith), Smoky
(Ne-Yo), and Deke (Marcus T. Paulk). They’re personalities more than
characters, which is disappointing, but it’s the kind of surface-level American
cross-section of types that comes with the middling WWII movie territory.
They’re good pilots. Some of them are even great pilots. We
first meet them flying across the fields of Italy running a routine patrol.
They’ve only blown up one little Nazi truck when they cross paths with an
innocent-looking train that becomes a whole lot less innocent when Nazi
anti-aircraft guns in the back car open fire. They dip down and manage to not
only derail the train, but to blow it up as well. But it’s all so unsatisfying.
How embarrassing to be simply “shooting traffic,” as one pilot grumbles. Their
commanders agree. Through the commander of their base in Italy (Cuba Gooding
Jr.) to a D.C. liaison (Terrence Howard), the Airmen make their case to the stubborn,
prejudiced brass.
Following the true story insofar as it affords the potential
for aerial combat, the script by John Ridley (with extra, unfortunately rather
personality free work from Boondocks writer/creator
Aaron McGruder) pounds half-heartedly through some flavorless cardboard drama on
the ground to get these heroes from takeoff to takeoff. Everything between the
landings seems tossed aside and half-hearted, conflicts between characters that
bubble up in a line of dialogue and disappear entirely forgotten for large
periods of time. It’s strange for a movie so thin to feel overstuffed but when
a subplot that’s essentially a remake of The
Great Escape involves only one character we’ve previously met and lasts all
of two-and-a-half scenes, it’s hard to feel otherwise.
There’s rich story potential to be mined here, but the movie
skips across the surface of deeper resonance on its way to find visceral
heroics. A fair amount of the movie contains clichéd fighter pilot dialogue
shouted over the roar of plane engines. Anthony Hemingway, who has directed a
handful of episodes in several different recent series of note (including The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, and Community), is sitting in the director’s
chair and, though he’s no good at figuring out how to outmaneuver the
blockheaded clichés of the script, he’s certainly good at figuring out how to
stay out of the way of the Industrial Light and Magic CGI battles in
the sky.
It’s here that the influence of producer George Lucas (who, to his
credit, has tried out of his passion for this under-told story to get this film
made for decades before finally financing it himself) is most clearly felt. The
way these planes fly about shooting at each other, with routine fighter pilot
patter howling over the roar of propellers and gunfire feels awfully
reminiscent of X-Wings and TIE Fighters zapping at each other in the dark of
space. It’s sad to say that those Star
Wars space battles are significantly more thrilling than these
based-on-a-true-story dogfights, but there you have it.
The film feels weirdly inconsequential with a storyline that
zips off in too many directions to really make an impact. But the look of the
film is a problem too. Shot on digital in a terrible use of the medium, the
image is weirdly bright and artificial and entirely textureless. It’s naturally
void of the nuance of film grain but without satisfactorily compensating for it
by using the unique visual properties of digital a la the recent work of
Michael Mann, David Fincher, and Steven Soderbergh (whose Haywire is probably playing the next auditorium over and definitely
making far better use of digital camerawork).
I was rooting for this movie. It gives me no pleasure to write this. Walking out of the theater, my dissatisfaction made me sad. All the
material was in place for a great fun throwback: a terrific story, a fine cast,
and a great special effects company. But the filmmakers simply failed to crack
the story’s difficulties. The film lacks shape and, though it’s oddly simple
and perhaps perversely upbeat, it lacks the momentum and the visceral filmmaking
power of the best war films. Truffaut once said that it was hard to make an
anti-war film because war looks inherently exciting on film. Not this one. It
tries its hardest, and succeeds from time to time, but the thing never coheres
one way or the other, or at all.
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