George Lucas’ “Red Tails” fails to take flight

January 23, 2012 by Garrett Estrada 

World War II movie fails to engage with flat characters and stereotypes

In a perfect world, Red Tails would have been a good movie.

It is based on the little-known story of the Tuskegee training program in World War II, an all African-American division of fighter pilots who fought and proved they belonged on the front lines with the white pilots. “Red Tails” could have been a powerful war story that dealt with pilots who battled their own military’s racial discrimination as well as Nazi aces.

The film is also reported to be the last big blockbuster film produced by the formerly revered and more recently loathed filmmaker George Lucas. In that regard, Red Tails could have been a high-octane action showpiece to send off his illustrious blockbuster career in style.

I wish Red Tails was either of those things, but unfortunately it just flat out sucks.

The main problem is that, as a basic war film, Red Tails fails to engage.

Its characters are all two-dimensional cardboard cut-outs of soldier archetypes that audiences have seen a dozen times before. From Joe “Lightning” Little, the fearless maverick who breaks all the rules to Marty “Easy” Julian, the alcoholic captain who can’t control his men on the battlefield (or in this case, the sky), the main characters feel more like stereotypes than people.

Even the little star power the movie has, Colonel A.J. Ballard (Terrence Howard, Law & Order: LA) and Major Emanuelle Stance (Cuba Gooding Jr., Pearl Harbor) is squandered on performances that seem phoned in. Gooding Jr. in particular seems lost in every scene he is in. He often attempts to look stoic by chomping on a big pipe, and delivers the worst “Yes sir” reading I’ve ever heard, which actually got an audience wide laugh.

Then again it doesn’t help that all the dialogue in the movie seems to have been written by cliche supercomputer, as it has managed to pull just about every bad trope of war movies into one, overly long, two-hour mishmash of soldiers triumphing “against all odds.”

Despite all this, Red Tails could have redeemed itself if it at least had some decent action (it worked for the third Transformers movie), but again the movie falls flat. While the CGI airplanes look great flying around, the actual dogfights against the Nazis never packs any sort of punch, even with the full weight of Lucas’s fantastic animation studio behind it.

And on the subject of action, this is one of those infuriating films where the enemies always seem to be shooting with their eyes closed and the heroes always walk away unscathed. One particular scene involves a pilot who survives being shot, sprayed with leaking gasoline and crashing into the ground in a fireball.
It is head-shakingly dumb.

Even the racial discrimination component, the last critical piece to telling an important story in American history, is distilled down into an overly simplified (and please excuse the intended pun) black and white portrayal of good versus evil. Just about all the main white characters in the film start off as condescending racists and all the black men as overlooked underdogs just fighting for a chance.

The whole thing feels like a bad Disney channel original movie trying to teach middle school kids how to treat everyone equally, with some explosions sprinkled in every now and then.

The only authentic feeling part of the film is the ending text, which notes the true life accomplishments of the Tuskegee fighter pilots in the war.

I just wish they had a better film to pay them tribute.