Red Tails (2012)

Director: Anthony Hemingway                            Writers: John Ridley & Aaron McGruder
Film Score: Terence Blanchard                          Cinematography: John B. Aaronson
Starring: Terrence Howard, Cuba Gooding Jr., Brian Cranston and Gerald McRaney

Wow, this film is so incredibly disappointing that I’m almost beside myself. It’s one thing to besmirch the memory of citizen soldiers who gave their lives by mining World War II for video game films like Company of Heroes, but to do the same to men who not only fought the Germans but had to fight their own white, racist comrades as well unconscionable. George Lucas should be ashamed of himself for allowing this script, and this director to produce something this horrible. How you read this script and say “okay,” here’s 60 million, go and make it is difficult to believe, but how can you watch the dailies and not pull the plug on it in the first week? It’s embarrassing to watch. And it doesn’t have to be this way. There have been great films about blacks in war, Glory and A Soldier’s Story among them. I have no tolerance for this kind of trash. Red Tails is the worst kind of bad film.

Right from the beginning you know you’re in for something bad. The opening has a mass of American bombers flying a mission and as soon as a few German fighters fly through the formation all--that’s right, all--of the American escorts go chasing after them, leaving the bombers unprotected. This, of course, allows the next wave of German fighters to come through and strafe the hell out of the bombers. From there we cut to the black squadron of clichéd blacks blowing up a train like they’re the Harlem Globetrotters taking down the Washington Generals. Flying back home, one of them sees an Italian woman hanging out laundry, blows her a kiss, then shows up at her door the next day. Cuba Gooding Jr., smokes a pipe and winks at their lack of discipline, while Terrence Howard is in Washington begging Brian Cranston to let them fight in combat or pull the plug on the whole operation and gets them an air cover mission for a landing.

Almost everything in the script is bad. There’s no angst among the pilots. They’re glib braggarts who care more about how many planes they shoot down than the success of the soldiers they’re supporting at the landing. When the German planes approach, the one German bad guy talks into his mic and tells his flyers that the American pilots are rookies. How the hell could he possibly guess that? And speaking of the mics, no one wears their oxygen masks and so they have to use their free hand to hold the mic up to their mouths when they speak. The fight scenes are so completely done with digital effects that it looks like a video came. None of it looks realistic. The blacks disobey orders whenever they feel like it and leave the landing sight to follow a shot up German plane. That’s right, they abandon their mission! And if that wasn’t enough, all of them call the Germans “Jerries.” Now that’s the British name for the Germans and I can believe that Americans used the term once in a while, but ALL the time, by ALL the blacks? It makes no sense at all.

And this is just in the first forty minutes of the film. There are, literally, hundreds of things wrong with this film, unbelievable things, insulting things, racist things, historically inaccurate things. The genre reached its zenith with Saving Private Ryan and the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers over a decade ago. Since then there have been films like The Great Raid which, while not necessarily great, are at least interesting. But films like Company of Heroes and Red Tails are not just bad by comparison, they are bad in their own right and should not be allowed to proliferate. To not even make a cursory attempt at historical accuracy is one thing, but to simply overlay a modern sensibility onto an important time in our country’s history and an important struggle for a large part of our population and treat it all like a joke, is insulting. By that definition, Red Tails is the quintessential bad movie.