Red Tails (Anthony Hemingway) **

Here we have a movie that purports to tell an important story. It's about the Tuskegee Airmen, the first squadron of all black pilots, who overcame racism to find great success in World War 2. That's a worthy subject for a motion picture, but it's not really one that producer George Lucas and director Anthony Hemingway seem interested in telling. Instead, they've used the premise of the Tuskegee Airmen to fashion a standard Hollywood action film with fictionalized characters that are most are mostly one-dimensional cliche's. The result is a movie that mostly succeeds when the characters are in the air, but completely falters when on the ground.

The movie skips past the original training of the pilots in Tuskegee and puts us right in the middle of World War 2, where the Tuskegee squadron is doing routine missions where they bomb cargo trucks and trains. Colonel AJ Bullard (Terrence Howard) heads to Washington DC to try and convince leaders to give his squadron more dangerous missions and finds success after working his way through plenty of racism and doubt. The pressure is now on as defeat would almost certainly let the racists claim they were right all along, while success could lead to even more opportunities for black soldiers.

The really curious thing about this movie is the decision to come up with fictional characters to tell the story. This wouldn't necessarily be a problem if the fictional characters were at all interesting. For example, the great 1986 underdog basketball film Hoosiers did the same thing, but the fictional characters like Norman Dale and Jimmy Chitwood were memorable, fascinating people. Most of the people invented for Red Tails are not memorable whatsoever, certainly not as interesting as Benjamin Davis who was one of the first Tuskegee Airmen and eventually commanded the first all black flying squadron, later becoming the first African-American General in the Air force. The characters in Red Tails are caricatures that fit into specific types - drunk, jokester, hot dog, etc

It doesn't help that the dialogue in this film is atrocious, making it seem like they just patched the screenplay together from old war movies. The characters speak in generic and stilted dialogue, often forcing the actors to sound wooden or awkward, although the game cast does as good as can be expected with the material. I find it interesting that Boondocks creator Aaron McGruder is credited as a screenwriter on this. Boondocks was a very controversial and dynamic comic strip (and later animated series) that made some challenging satiric points about racial relations. Aside from one memorable line about the use of the word "colored", none of that insight or wit is evident here and I wonder if McGruder realizes this is a film that Huey Freeman would be ridiculing.

At least the dogfight sequences are suitably exciting. They really do a good job capturing the visceral thrill of combat flying, while making it easy to follow what's happening at all times. On those terms, I suspect many people will flock to this film and be very satisfied with it. But by attaching the significance of the Tuskegee Airmen, I think the film deserved more than the hackneyed writing delivered. It's not as if a more intelligent script would've turned audiences off, so there's no excuse other than general laziness. George Lucas talked about having trouble getting studios to back this project because it had a mostly black cast, so he took it upon himself to finance the film. If his goal was to show that you can make an action movie with black actors that's just as bad as most of the action movies with white actors, then I guess Red Tails is a tremendous success.