Red Tails (2012)

I cannot speak to the whole movie as I could not be bothered to waste my time all the way to the end. I can tell you why I left though. The acting was terrible. It is almost as if the actors are shot up with some kind of depressant. When they are attempting to be funny it comes across as ridiculous. When they are trying to be serious it comes across as boring and slight. When they are trying to be dramatic or inspiring it falls so far short as to make you wonder why you are still there. (and why I left).

Aside from the inadequate acting, the characters themselves as written are not what you would expect. They are not disciplined or particularly smart. They are benign, happy go lucky, airy, slapstick caricatures. The shots of them in combat ring about as true as Spy Kids.

It is really as though the people involved in making this movie have never even bothered to view other war movies, never mind trying to reach for the tone and feeling of real life war. There is no sense that the true emotional core of this topic is ever seriously attempted.

This subject matter is so inspiring on its own that it is quite shocking to see that something this unfeeling and flat could be the result.

Fmovies: Among the many problems I had with Red Tails, I suppose one of the most egregious was the incredibly overbearing and cloying musical score. But in a rather sad way, the score perfectly fits the entirely forced and artificial nature of the movie itself. Now, I know that typically a film's musical score is used to enhance emotion, but in the case of Red Tails, the music is so over-the-top, in-your-face, and cliché ridden that I couldn't help but laugh at times. One example is the music we hear when a soldier drives into an Italian town. Yes, we know we're in Italy, but in case anyone is confused we're treated to a musical cue that sounds like the spaghetti scene from Lady and the Tramp. And if you can't figure out that the German pilot is a bad guy, why, the music will certainly tell you! Well, that and the GIGANTIC SCAR ON HIS German FACE!

And I'm sure I'll be called a pinko/commie for saying this, but what was up with playing America the Beautiful during the credits? It felt so forced, like the music in one of those "patriotic" animatronic exhibits at Disneyland that gets mocked. And the reason those are mocked is because they are lifeless objects trying to manipulate and force us to feel something without actually LETTING us feel that way on our own. It's cynical trickery. And that's how I feel about the score of Red Tails and pretty much the movie in general.

The men of the 332nd were heroes and patriots. Real ones. But they were also real men, not the cartoon characters in Red Tails. And the Tuskegee Airmen deserve better than the childish fantasy of George Lucas by way of Anthony Hemingway.

This is a very unfortunate attempt to tell an important story and is a disservice to the men who lived these historic events. The character development is non-existent and portrays these men in a stereotypical light. The portrayal of the German pilots creates a comic book atmosphere, you can almost see the dialog bubble above their heads saying "Curses! Foiled again!" as they sneer at their adversaries. The flight sequences remind me of those from 1940s and 1950s films where the "planes" are plastic models on cables with the cameras panning the model to depict motion. The only flight sequences which are realistic are the landing and take-off scenes. I am extremely disappointed in this film and expected much more from Lucas.

Red Tails fmovies. My biggest problem is that I saw the 1995 film Tuskegee Airman and loved it. I had to compare this current film to that and unfortunately found it extremely lacking.

I don't feel any connection to the characters in this film. Live or die, who knows or cares.

Contrasting that with the Tuskegee Airman, when people died in that film, you felt it. You cared about each single character and were emotionally invested with them.

So my saying, wait for DVD, and if you want a much better film, buy the Tuskegee Airman. You wont be disappointed.

After ten minutes I began to tell myself... this can't be it. I continued watching... it was it. A bad joke, a nightmare, rubbish. You know the constant sensation and the feeling that something is really wrong... I don't have that often with films... but this one managed. How I managed not to break it off and leave it be is something I still can't explain.

From the first to the last dialog... nonsense, flat, cheese, even stupid, not funny at all, even when they searched fun. The characters... why bother to play? How it is possible, that good actors make such movies will always astonish me. The story... there are probably a lot of teenagers writing better stories. An accumulation of stereotypes. Blacks are cool, fun, indisciplined, all buds, unbreakable, superheroes. The white pilots are mean, racists. The Germans are just the incarnation of robotic evil... or something like that. Realism... no way! Nothing was believable... nor the actions, nor the acting...

Lamentably it is not a film to forget easily... horrid films seldom are... because you are constantly reminded how stupid you were to have made the mistakes of believing it was something to see and then actually watching it till the end.

I figured with names such as George Lucas, Cuba Gooding Jr and Terrence Howard that Red Tails had to be a great movie. I couldn't have been more wrong. To start with the acting was sub-standard, it was as though I was sitting through a high school play. Everyone was very robotic sounding, no heart and soul per se. Gooding's performance was his worse yet and him constantly gnawing away on his unlit pipe, which he was pretending to smoke became an ongoing joke, I think they meant to put CGI smoke in afterwards but perhaps Mr. Lucas forgot or ran out of money to spend. On the bright side it was nice to see the guy that played Rick Simon from the 80's show Simon & Simon was alive and well. The plot was absolutely miserable. Characters that had no place being there, in particular the Italian love interest of one of the pilots. It seemed like the intent was suppose to be a sidelined plot, but if that was the idea, it failed. She had no place in this story. All the white folk are made out to be racists, save a few kind officers who pull for the Tuskegee airmen to get a fail shake, the white fighter pilots come off as over zealot morons who abandon their task at every whim to chase decoys, there is an alcoholic pilot who would have been booted from flying long ago, the reckless one that does what he wants and disobeys orders, who would have been court martialed and discharged in the first 10 minutes of the movie, and the list goes on and on, it was unbearable. Also, in this movie, apparently pilots are not subject to the laws of physics and G-force. The CGI looked cartoonish. The fighter planes were doing stunts and manoeuvres that would be obviously impossible in reality. Trains that explode and derail when shot at by 50 calibre guns, it goes on and on...Look I know it is a movie and not a documentary, but it kills me when at the beginning of the film it boldly states that this movie is based on factual events. The only factual events in Red Tails is that there was an all African American fighter squadron who painted their plane tails red, PERIOD. Bottom line, this flick had B-movie acting, crappy direction, a God-awful script, corny dog fighting scenes, cheap CGI graphics, unrealistic physics defying stunts and a out of place musical score, hip-hop music over the closing credits, please. I wish I never saw this movie.