Red Tails | Film review

This latest Hollywood salute to the Tuskegee Airmen—America’s first all-black military aviation team—is so old-fashioned it makes War Horse look postmodern. Set aside the racial politics and the CGI fighter planes, and you might mistake Red Tails for a bona fide WWII propaganda film. Certainly, its rah-rah, down-with-the-Jerries spirit is decades removed from the war-is-hell moralizing of contemporary combat cinema. Here, faceless German foes are blown to smithereens with jingoistic glee. Meanwhile, our nicknamed heroes, played by a platoon of hip-hop idols and former Wire cast members, spout clichéd battle banter with gee-whiz conviction. For low-watt star power, there’s Cuba Gooding Jr., chomping on a Sherlock Holmes pipe as a commanding officer, and Terrence Howard, fighting his own campaign against segregation back in Washington.

The retro approach would be more convincing (and endearing) had director Anthony Hemingway put actual airplanes in the sky. Instead we get weightless digital dogfights that bear more than a passing resemblance to the ones producer George Lucas staged in his seminal space operas. The dialogue, too, stinks of Star Wars: “Damn those glory-hogging bastards,” someone shouts early on, while the film’s cartoonish Nazi bandits are prone to exclamations like “My God! Those pilots are African!” Red Tails only flies when it gets out of the cockpit and onto the ground, where the acting talents of its band of brothers can’t be upstaged by Industrial Light & Magic.