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.