Saturday morning, I attended the very first matinee of the day, at 1220 pm. I need to go to these more often, because the ticket was only $4.75 (caveat: I currently live in Southern Mississippi.) Despite the 'early' time, the place was almost sold out.
What movie had everyone up and about at the break of noon on a Saturday?
On to the review!
Now, this is going to be a tough review, because there are already people claiming that race has something to do with Red Tail's release date. With that in mind, I'll do my usual review of what I thought of it as a movie, then address my theories on the race issue afterwards.
First off, Red Tails is an incredibly ambitious film. It attempts to tell the story of a group of Tuskegee Airmen in the middle of WWII. Based on real events, it follows the 332nd Fighter Group as they are given opportunities to demonstrate their flying prowess in real combat situations.
The great: Lucasfilms did a fantastic job with the special effects. It's obvious that a lot of effort went into the dogfights. All three dimensions were utilized perfectly, giving the action sequences that sense of utter chaos and confusion that one can only assume occurs when you're worrying about 360 degrees of combat.
The good: The actors. While I'm not going to start handing out awards anytime soon, it's obvious that all the actors enjoyed their roles. You can tell that many of them felt honored to be telling such an important, overlooked story in America's history, and they took it to heart.
The not-so-good: The script. Though the actors were fun to watch, holy shit did they have some absolutely terrible lines. On top of that, because Red Tails is such a big movie, there are a ton of characters to introduce. Whenever a movie has to do that, most of those characters become one-dimensional. It's just a matter of budgeting your time in the movie. You can't flesh out 24 people in 2 hours, so you make 22 of them simple. 'Funny guy,' 'angry guy', 'religious guy', etc.
The problem here is that they tried to give you 6 or 7 fully fleshed-out characters, which ended up making EVERYONE one-dimensional. Even the main characters end up being less than they could have been if the film has just calmed down and focused on two or three guys.
The terrible: Cuba Gooding Jr. He's the lone exception to my good actors comment. His entire role in this movie is to move the plot along when it starts to stutter, but he does it by use of a huge pipe. Yeah, that didn't make any damn sense to me either. Someone apparently told him that all the cool officers in WWII smoked, and those that smoked pipes were even more awesome.
All of his acting can be summed up thusly: *Puts pipe in mouth with slow, grandiose movements. Smile. Wait for someone to say something. Pull pipe from mouth.* "Yes." *Look thoughtful. Put pipe back in mouth using motion that screams 'look at me! I smoke a pipe!'*
It's painfully obvious that he has absolutely no idea what smoking a pipe is like. Every awesome old man I ever knew who smoked a pipe made it seem like a natural extension of their body. It just magically appeared and disappeared as needed. It was never a distracting or flashy object for the real pipe smoker. It just was.
Warning: Opinions ahead.
You cannot discuss the Tuskegee Airmen without addressing racism. Red Tails knows that and tries to incorporate it into the plot. Bryan Cranston is the racist-ass officer who squares off against Terrence Howard's character, and there are a few scenes where white Airmen interact with the Tuskegee Airmen, both in and outside of combat.
The problem is that Red Tails would rather be a fun, entertaining family film. It wants to be a low-violence war movie that makes you sit back and laugh, oohing and ahhing at the screen during the bloodless action sequences. It stutters when it tries to make you shake your head and tsk when racism is briefly, lightly acknowledged.
I just don't think you can that it successfully. You can't have people cheering for your intrepid heroes and then, next scene, have a guy who has shown absolutely no rage issues suddenly become your angry, anti-racism character, then have him never address racism again. Maybe it's the sloppy writing I mentioned earlier, but it feels like the race issues were only put in because you HAVE to address them when telling this story.
It's obvious that executive producer George Lucas would have happily ignored all of it if he could have and just given us two hours of the underdog proving the world wrong. Unfortunately, George, this isn't The Mighty Ducks. This is history. That being said, I really don't think the studio's decision to release it in January was racially motivated. I think it's because, at 2 hours, it's either far too short to tell the story it wanted, and far too long to be a light, family-friendly war movie.
All in all, it's still a fun movie, but with the weight of history behind it, I can't help but think that it could have been so much better. I still prefer my war movies to be gritty and realistic, and I genuinely would love to see this particular topic addressed in an adult way some day.
I'll still take Black Hawk Down or The Thin Red Line over this any day, because I like my war movies to be gritty and painfully realistic. I believe that no matter what war you're covering, keeping it clean and family-friendly does a disservice to the wars fought and the people who fought them. Clean war makes people think real war is just as clean. Still, Red Tails is much, much better than Pearl Harbor or Flyboys.
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