This should have been a home run, or at the very least a stand up triple. The true tale of the Tuskegee Airmen fighting both Nazism abroad and bigotry at home (as well as abroad) is a great story, full of patriotic and humane heroics and the type of underdog characters that people love so much. It would seem that it would be pretty easy to make a really good film based on this incredible story – just recap the historical events, insert interesting characters, film the whole thing and BOOM you have an entertaining and hopefully culturally significant movie.
So what’s up with Red Tails? It’s not like everyone didn’t go into this with the best of intentions. Spearheaded and completely financed by oft-derided George Lucas, this movie was made for all the right reasons and seemingly with the right elements set in place – it’s not like this is some soulless money grab, someone’s attempt to simply cash in on the legacy of the Tuskegee Airmen. On the contrary, Lucas struggled to get this movie made for decades and finally ended up paying for the whole thing himself. He got the writer of Undercover Brother and Three Kings to write the script and then got Boondocks mastermind Aaron McGruder to give the script a polish before handing it off to television director Anthony Hemingway, who was between gigs on HBO’s Treme and handled directorial duties. Seemed promising. Looks like Red Tails should have been pretty awesome.
Well, it ain’t awesome. Red Tails is passable for the most part, and entertaining enough for most of the running time, but there are just way too many problems with this thing. First off, with all of the energy spent in actually getting this movie made, the story development itself seemed to go by the wayside. Choosing to tell the story of the Airmen as they worked off a base in Italy, doing clean up work and wishing for a chance to do some actual combat flying, they must have figured that their inherent story and plight was enough to make the movie work and development of actual characters wasn’t necessary. Following a core group of airmen within the group, these fighter pilots are all reduced to singular traits – there’s the drunk leader, the throw out the rulebook super pilot (think Top Gun here), the religious guy who constantly cries out to Black Jesus, the young kid trying to get everyone to stop calling him Junior and start calling him Ray Gun (because that’s such a grown up nickname), and then there’s a bunch of random guys filling out the group.
None of the characters offer anything compelling or interesting, which is sad because this story deserves a better movie. The “drunk” guy often goes to his bottle or flask of whisky to keep his hands steady, and his drinking comes into question for his decisions, but they never really show his drinking as being the cause of his problems, it’s not like he goes up in the air completely hammered and the plane is all wobbly because he can’t fly it straight and he makes bad decisions because he’s seeing double from all of the booze. It’s nowhere near that kind of “drunk.” They show him being depressed, or nervous, and taking a nip from his bottle, and otherwise everything seems okay. Yet they try to mine drama and suspense and characterization from this and it falls flat. And then there’s the ace of the group, marching to the beat of his own band, often flying out of formation to seek out Germans and take them down, and apparently he’s a bit of a womanizer, or at least we are led to believe by his banter with his roommate, the drunk leader. The ace pilot ends up meeting a nice Italian gal, and of course they fall in love, and if you don’t know where this leads, then you have never seen a movie before.
And then the story itself goes to places that they did not have the time or the budget to properly explore. There’s a sequence in which an airmen is captured and imprisoned as a POW in a German prisoner camp, and literally in a matter of two scenes he is part of the least daring and exciting prison escape ever, and this whole POW sequence is laughable in its brevity and ridiculously simplistic dialogue and characters. This simplicity extends to most of the peripheral characters, including the few white characters who exist only to be racist, with some of them ultimately being convinced that these black airmen are just as valuable to the military and to their lives as any other airmen, thanks to their exemplary battle records. And then of course the Germans are just the Germans, a collection of faceless and soulless digital avatars, set up as any enemy would be set up in a World War II based video game.
That video game feel permeates the actual action scenes, too. While most of it is pretty well staged and presented (which should be expected from the guy who brought us the Star Wars aerial battles), it still looked digital, like cut scenes from a very high end video game. But despite the digital look, the action scenes are still good, which makes it a shame that the characters involved in these action scenes are that interesting individually. Then again, it wasn't about what these men did as individuals, it's about what they did as a group, and while that's an important point and helps give these action scenes some gravity, its kind of hard to care about guys getting shot down when your not sure which one goes down in the first place.
Red Tails isn’t a total wash out, as it has some entertainment value, and the actors are compelling and charismatic enough to do what they can with their thinly written roles. Truth be told, the screening I saw had several audience members crying at just the "right" moments and ended with a smattering of applause as the credits rolled, so it was enough for most of the people there. This would almost make for a good classroom movie, something to throw on to help tell the story of the Tuskegee Airmen. But then again, maybe they should just stick to the HBO film from the 1990’s that told the same story but did it a little better, with more emphasis on character and less on action. Because even though the situation itself is compelling in its historical significance, a movie needs compelling characters to become enduring and worthwhile.
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