Movie review: ‘Red Tails’ – history freighted with much melodrama
In George Lucas’ years-in-the-making “Red Tails,” the famed Tuskegee Airmen are freighted with such a heavy load of physics-defying digital effects, a crew of such clunky, clichéd characters and a script so laden with over-the-top melodrama that their soaring story of heroism in the face of institutionalized racism very nearly goes down in flames.
With Lucas at the throttle as executive producer (marshaling a visual effects force that numbers some 485 personnel), this old-fashioned World War II epic naturally features its share of eye-popping, whiz-bang aerial battle scenes – dog fights with buzzing, swooping, curlicueing P-40 Warhawks and P-51 Mustangs doing battle with Luftwaffe Messerschmidt Bf-109s and ME-262s amid the lumbering of bomb-burdened B-17 Flying Fortresses.
Lucas and his director, Anthony Hemingway (“Treme” and dozens more TV credits), definitely know how to deliver big, bold, stomach-knotting CGI scenes. It’s when they attempt to ground their war story in human-level drama that their film sputters badly.
The inspirational story of America’s first squadron of African-American fighter pilots in World War II has been told before on screen, in 1995’s far better HBO drama “The Tuskegee Airmen,” with Laurence Fishburne, Countney B. Vance and Andre Braugher leading a stellar cast.
Lucas has assembled an equally fine cast here, but the pedestrian and heavily fictionalized script by John Ridley and Aaron McGruder doesn’t do them justice.
The tale opens with the 332nd Fighter Group (soon to be nicknamed the Red Tails for obvious reasons) wasting away behind the lines in Italy, flying meaningless, busy-work missions in rattletrap old P-40s.
They’re a colorful crew of stereotypes, misfits and comic-book aces with handles like Lightning (David Oyelowo) and Easy (Nate Parker), bickering best friends at the center of the drama. Surrounding them are one-issue characters such as Sticks (Method Man), Junior (Tristan Wilds), Smoky (Ne-Yo), Joker (Elijah Kelley) and Bumps (Michael B. Jordan).
Away in Washington, D.C., lobbying his bigoted white superiors (notably Brian Cranston and Gerald McRaney) for a combat assignment is the saintly C.O., Col A.J Bullard (Terrance Howard), and keeping patient watch over the restless airman in Italy is the pipe-chomping Maj. Stance (Cuba Gooding Jr.).
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