For 24 years, George Lucas has been developing a film about the Tuskegee Airmen, the all African American squad of army pilots during World War II. Now, the dream has come true and the final result of "Red Tails" is a too long, tedious, all noise and no heart time killer. It makes one yearn for the memories of Lucas's "Star Wars" and "Indiana Jones".
In 1944 Italy, a group of four army pilots has been summoned to protect bombers over Germany. Along the way, they have encounters with friendship, romance, danger and overcoming death.
The film's director, Anthony Hemingway should have stuck to directing TV shows before filming this lackluster effort. John Ridley and Aaron McGruber's script feels third rate and mostly shifts into territories of melodrama and clichés. They should have taken out the bad subplot involving a romance between an Italian girl and one of the pilots and remained focused to expand on the story of the Airmen. The art direction looks like it's been borrowed from too many movies and the action sequences fails to generate any thrills. The visual effects from Industrial Light and Magic add no excitement to the action.
The young actors playing the pilots {David Oyelowo, Nate Parker, Tristan Wilds and Elijah Kelly} and the acting veterans {Cuba Gooding Jr. and Terrence Howard} feel like they're taking their roles forcefully instead of seriously. Both Gooding Jr. and Howard proved one thing in their respective roles: They were both in the film just for the money.
All in all, this fails both in entertainment and as a history lesson. For the past four decades, Lucas wowed audiences by showing them how movies can take people to brand new worlds with "Star Wars" and "Indy". Now, this time, he has failed. Both Lucas and the Tuskegee Airmen deserved better.
In the end, the best thing to come out of this is the thing before the film itself. The "thing" that I'm talking about is the trailer for the upcoming and hopefully very funny "Three Stooges" movie.
Rating: 1 star
