Red Tails is the sort of movie where it doesn’t take long to realize that what you’re watching isn’t going to be very good. Right off the bat, the opening credits looked like something out of a bad TV show from the 70s. Here we are, witnessing an assumedly big budget World War II era dog fight, and all of the action is obscured by giant red words right in the middle of the screen. What you’re left with is a swirling of colors and some really painful dialogue being delivered by really stiff actors. This is the sort of movie that opens with the line, “Germans! Let’s get ‘em!” and never lets up from there. If that’s the sort of thing that sound like good, clean fun to you, well then I assure you it is not. Their is nothing that is self aware or “just for fun” about this movie at all. Everything it has to offer is delivered with the subtlety of a Saturday morning cartoon, but we’re supposed to react to it all like what we’re watching is high drama.
A little bit of heavy handed drama is something I was completely prepared for when I was coming into this one though. What I wasn’t prepared for was just how bad the acting in the opening sequence was. I literally couldn’t believe how clunky and miserable every line reading came off as. More than just bad takes, it sounded like what we were getting was rock dumb dialogue being delivered as purposely awfully as anyone could manage. This death by acting was just evident in the opening scene, and a few others where white pilots in big bomber planes are involved though. Once the focus goes over to the Tuskegee Airmen and their all-black fighter squadron, the acting improves about 1000%. Was it an artistic choice to cast only white actors that are terrible at their job, in order to make the black actors who come in later look that much better? Was this a strategy the director, Anthony Hemingway, was using to recreate the experience of black pilots outflying white pilots in the back of the audience’s minds? I realize I sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist, but I have no other explanation for how every white actor flying a plane in this movie managed to make the pilots in A New Hope look like masters at their craft. If the decision was purposeful, I think it’s a really interesting strategy; but one that failed completely.
Happily, though the supporters in this movie tend to be terrible actors, most of the principle actors fare considerably better. I mean, heck, for fans of The Wire, we get to see both Wallace and Bubbles in this thing. That’s reason enough to celebrate right there. Nate Parker and David Oyelowo get the heaviest lifting to do as the drunken squad leader Easy and the hotshot ace Lightning, and they’re both perfectly acceptable and even kind of charming in the roles, even though their characters are painted with rather broad strokes on the page. Terrence Howard plays Colonel Bullard, the head of the whole operation, and he is able to lend a gravity and a credibility to a role that needs to come off as authoritative. It’s only Cuba Gooding Jr. who embarrasses as far as the principal cast goes. He’s playing a character named Major Stance, but he seems more like he’s trying to do a live action version of Popeye than anything else. I mean, I’ve seen him lose himself in some laughably showy performances before, but this was ridiculous. The whole movie he’s carrying around and fiddling with this tobacco pipe, and it’s clear that he’s more concerned with making a show of how ridiculous his pipe chomping skills are than crafting any sort of realistic character. He looked like he was about to tie a damsel to some railroad tracks, and none of what he did was necessary at all. That he shared most of his scenes with Howard, who completely sold his character, made watching him even more embarrassing. Why did no one pull him aside and tell him to cut it out at any point during the filming of this movie?
One of my biggest fears when approaching Red Tails was that the plane fights were going to rely too heavily on shoddy CGI and watching all of the aerial battles was going to be about as fun as watching somebody play a video game. Those fears were unfounded, while things never quite got to the point of looking photo real, the CGI employed was good enough to get the job done. These planes weren’t the cartoony monstrosities I saw in some of the film’s advertising. And the production actually managed to impress in other ways. The airfield the characters live on is super impressive and just gorgeous in the way it’s realized. Not only does it look authentic and expansive, but clearly great pains were taken to make sure that everything looks lived in as well. I’d go as far as to call all of the tent dwellings and mud paths that make up the airfield meticulous in their recreation. High praise indeed.
But this movie’s script is just too bad to make any of that mean anything. Every aspect of the screenwriting lacks subtlety and skill. The themes are hammered home into your head with no thought given to presenting shades of grey. The black characters are all mensches, great at what they do and generally kind at heart. The white Americans are misguided, but inherently good. They start off as close-minded, but once they’re introduced to the charms of the magical negro they come around to stuff like basic human equality. The Germans though, they’re not even human beings at all. We watch German soldiers being burned alive and we’re asked to cheer; at no point are any pains taken to portray them as thinking, feeling human beings. Forgive the pun, but the world of Red Tails is black and white, good and bad; and anything that doesn’t fit into that schematic is ignored.
The film is just too long as well. A two hour long film is going to have to introduce some nuance at some point in order to remain interesting, and this one never manages it. There’s a subplot that runs throughout involving a rookie pilot named Junior (Tristan Wilds) that stood out to me as the thing that could have been excised immediately. He’s shot down and becomes a German prisoner, locked up in a Stalag 17 stand-in conveniently referred to as Stalag 18, and we follow him as he falls in with the other prisoners in executing an escape plan. The real movie Stalag 17 took two hours to tell just this story, so to think that a mini version of it could be shoe horned into the middle of this film about fighter pilots and not come off as extraneous was foolish. This script should have had some cuts made to it before it went in front of the cameras, or at least some more work should have been done in the editing room.
But the biggest problem is that, for an epic war film, there just aren’t any surprises, any thrills, any big, emotional climaxes. Everything Red Tails tries just falls flat. This movie telegraphs every move it makes, and it always leaves you three steps ahead of all the big moments. When a character expresses an enthusiasm for combat, you know that they’re the first one getting shot down. When someone’s life improves due to a joyous development, you know that they’re the next one doomed. When we’re told a character has bit the dust, but when we never actually see it happen, you know that they’re set for a triumphant return. If this was the first story you were ever told, then maybe it could have worked, but otherwise trying to get emotionally involved in Red Tails is just an exercise in futility.
