Red Tails
Directed by Anthony Hemingway
Two and One Half Stars
Perhaps a greater rebuke to racism than Anthony Hemingway’s
tepid “Red Tails” is the reality that the film got made at all. George Lucas,
that most notorious toymaker of the silver screen, purportedly dumped some $53
million of his own money into the film because the studios had trepidations
about the marketability of a film with all black actors. I have little doubt
the film will do well. That worry seems a miscalculation. But if the film does
perform poorly at the box office it won’t be because of the skin color of its
leads. It will be because it is a bad film. Caught between a rock and a hard
place, the varying success of the effort will either validate the hesitant
studios’ prophecies of lingering cultural racism or their own cynicism.
“Red Tails” is an action movie, and is mired in the
weaknesses of that genre that its disciples so often dismiss. Its dialog is
hopelessly inane. The action itself is slopped together with excessive editing
and special effects. No effort is made to maintain any spatial relationships between interacting elements of any scene.
Hemingway does enough to give one the vague sense that something is happening in
front of them and little more. But if any real-life action heroes deserved
better than this lazy popcorn treatment, it was the Tuskegee Airmen who, during
WWII with hand-me-down planes and ramshackle equipment built a reputation as
one of America ’s
most formidable squads of fighter pilots.
This they did in the age of Jim Crow, a squad of almost
exclusively black fighter pilots, generals, and mechanics. They were left with
janitorial missions, blowing up freight trains far behind the front lines
because of a twisted study released by the United States military deeming
black people intellectually ill-equipped for complex machinery. They gained
notoriety with the armed forces by protecting fleets of B-52 Bombers with
unusual efficiency. I recall a moment after just such a scene when a white B-52
pilot subtly explains, “I sure hope we get those Red Tails again!”
One must ponder the point, really. This production, championed
by Mr. Lucas, wasn’t the first big screen portrayal of the Tuskegee Airmen (nor
was it the second…or third). “Red Tails” isn’t an effort to place an action
movie in the purpose of a social or political agenda. It is an effort to do the
exact opposite. I’ve read in a handful of negative reviews of the film that it
was – and I’m paraphrasing here – at least a noble effort, that at least Mr.
Lucas and Mr. Hemingway made the effort (and put down the money) to make a
movie about great people. I’m not so satisfied.
The undertaking of commendable source material doesn’t
abdicate one from the moral and ethical consequences of a failed or lazy film.
Indeed it rather intensifies the responsibilities assumed by the filmmaker.
“Red Tails” is a con, an assembly line dog fight thriller thinly veiled as a
glorious testament to the perseverance of an oppressed minority. One can only
hope this injustice provokes a real film about these great men from someone
with even the most remote emotional connection to them.
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