War story shot down by clichés
RED TAILS Starring: Cuba Gooding Jr., Terrence Howard and Gerald Mcraney Directed by: Anthony Hemingway PG: violence, coarse language Running time: 124 minutes Rating:
African- Americans always got second billing in the Second World War, as well as in its ancillary propaganda, so it only seems fair to have a movie like Red Tails join the calcified annals of highly mediated Yankee war imagery.
After all, white men have been romanticized as self- sacrificing warriors since the very inception of Hollywood, when D. W. Griffith cranked out hooded KKK heroes in Birth of a Nation. The black war experience has largely been an afterthought — or worse, a gesture of tokenism — until now, thanks to a growing pool of AfricanAmerican A- list talent willing to retrace the steps the history with an eye for revision.
That said, the story of the Tuskegee airmen has been told before, but Red Tails may be the first theatrical release about the U. S. air force’s great experiment in racial advancement to attempt old- fashioned hokum.
A moronic script covered in cheese, Red Tails opens with a group of ragtag heroes flying reconnaissance missions over Italy. We listen to these handsome rogues banter about their “hand- me- down” aircraft, their second- class treatment, their lack of interesting missions, and girls, girls, girls.
Yes, even though these men are outsiders who have been disrespected by white authority, the filmmakers want to make it clear these men are no different from their melanin- challenged colleagues: They are macho men of war who enjoy shooting down Germans, drinking hard, and loving the ladies.
Watching these hackneyed war- movie clichés replayed in a different colour grows tiresome quickly, but director Anthony Hemingway ( The Wire) seems to revel in every queasy moment, desperately trying to conjure a sense of old- fashioned romance without realizing all the conventions are dated.
There are moments when everyone is bringing their best to the frame, particularly in the more controversial scenes featuring Terrence Howard as the commander in charge of the pilots trained at Tuskegee, and the white brass who accuse the black pilots of underperforming and being lazy.
Howard has chops and he has oodles of screen presence. So does the Oscar- winning Cuba Gooding Jr. But Howard is barely seen, and Gooding looks like a cartoon version of U. S. general Douglas Macarthur chewing on a pipe and grinning.
The Tuskegee pilots proved an exceptional benefit to the American war effort — once they got a chance to prove themselves. They weren’t timid or insecure about their flying abilities, and, to make sure everyone knew who they were in the air, they painted the tails of their aircraft bright red.
This leads to one of the worst lines uttered on the big screen in recent memory, as a group of contrite, white bomber pilots finally take their hats off to their black brothers in arms, saying something to the effect of: “We were wrong, you Red Tails are swell.”
All in all, Red Tails is a warmovie tragedy, but not because of the central storyline honouring the brave black pilots who helped assure Allied victory, but because it was so poorly executed at every level, the very accomplishments the movie is trying to expound look empty, selfish and, frequently, downright stupid.