In “Red Tails,” the famed Tuskegee Airmen get the John Wayne-style heroic rendering they very much deserve, but in a hackneyed and weirdly context-less story that does them a disservice.
Long a pet project of his, George Lucas self-financed the film and has said he hopes “Red Tails” will prove there’s an audience for all-black movies. That’s a laudable goal, but “Red Tails” reduces a historical story of deep cultural significance to merely a flyboy flick.
Instead of creating something authentic and new, “Red Tails” superimposes the tale of the black World War II pilots on a dated, white genre of 1940s patriotic propaganda. “Red Tails” is blatantly old-fashioned, just with a change in color.
In medias res hardly says it: “Red Tails” opens in the midst of an aerial dog fight while the credits are still rolling. Director Anthony Hemingway plunges right into the action, skipping all that pesky backstory of black men braving the segregation of Jim Crowe America and, against the odds, rising up at the Tuskegee Institute.
That history was stressed in an earlier 1995 HBO film, “The Tuskegee Airmen,” which benefited from Laurence Fishburne’s sturdy presence. A co-star from that movie, Cuba Gooding Jr., is here, too, as the
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