"Red Tails"

**½

George Lucas has been passionately working for more than 20 years to get this movie on the screen, running into coincidentally the same problems the Tuskegee Airmen, on whom the film is based, encountered all those years ago. Namely: bigoted opinions of African Americans. Then it was what they could and would do in war, now it's whether a big budget action picture starring them would draw an audience. It is ironic then, that the movie we now have as a result of all that work and all that passion is so, well, bland. It is an action picture. And nothing more.

And it could have been so much better. It skips shallowly along the surface of the problems faced by the Airman: an n-word shouted by a white officer here, a one-note stereotype bigot commander there. Ultimately it eschews depth for flashy digital dogfights. Being the main focus of the film, these action scenes look good, but have little gusto and less tension; they are amateurishly staged, like most everything else. About halfway through the movie I suddenly decided this must be a first time film director, and sure enough when I researched later, I discovered director Anthony Hemingway has a number of television and assistant director credits, but this is his first time at the helm of a major motion picture, and it does show. Some scenes don't seem to end, but just stop. I swear at least once it happened mid-line. A surprising number of scenes are statically staged with people just sitting around and talking. For an action film, it has little momentum. Perhaps if Lucas had selected a more seasoned director the movie would have been better, but I'm not so sure. The script, you see, is just a mess. I assume Aaron McGruder (creator of the brilliant and subversive The Boondocks television series and comic strip), who shares screenwriting credit with John Ridley, mostly just contributed jokes. Though it sometimes misses, when it hits the humor is the best part of the movie. Surely he couldn't have been a part of these poorly written characters or this incredibly stilted dialogue. (The worst offenders: two white bomber pilots whose job it seems to be to sum up the feelings of the entire white air corps in as few words as possible. Clunky doesn't even begin to describe the words that come out of their mouths.)

The cast is a mixed bag. Of the ensemble of airmen some are good (Elijah Kelley as "Joker") some not so much (Tristan Wilds as "Junior"). And of their commanding officers, Terrence Howard is decent as Colonel A.J. Bullard, but doesn't approach the level we know he's capable of, and Cuba Gooding Jr. completely phones it in as Major Emanuelle Stance. And he's perpetually chewing on a pipe. And not smoking it. We see him light it once, but I'm pretty sure he never actually takes a puff. Can't say why, but that annoyed me. Daniela Ruah is very pretty as Italian peasant girl Sofia, whose mother is far too happy with her dating a black man (at least if my knowledge of the racial opinions of elderly Italian peasants in the 40's is accurate). Yes, very pretty. And that's all she needs to be.

The movie wants to celebrate the courage of these groundbreaking African Americans, but if you ask me it only celebrates half. Yes, they got up in those planes and risked their lives to fight for their country. Many white pilots did that too. But these guys did more. They leaped barriers and smashed prejudiced "factual" opinions, endured the worst kind of ignorant hatred and still held their heads up and risked their lives. By skimming the surface of this added burden, the movie has ultimately done them a disservice. The fairly substantial audience I watched with applauded at the end. I could not bring myself to join them. I would like to believe, however, that they were applauding the heroes this movie is based on, and not the movie itself. The men are more than worthy of our applause and our respect. The movie is not.