Red Tails
DIRECTED BY ANTHONY HEMINGWAY
In positioning his long-gestating passion project as the bellwether of the viability of the all-black blockbuster, executive producer George Lucas has effectively established Red Tails as Hollywood’s version of Operation Shingle. The film is based on the distinguished Second World War exploits of the African American aviators known as the Tuskegee Airmen, and reveals that, prior to Shingle in 1944, black flyers were restricted to ground-attack sorties by racist brass, who doubted their suitability for air-to-air engagements. With the future of the Tuskegee program at stake, Shingle saw the all-black 99th Fighter Squadron finally provided with airborne targets in support of an amphibious invasion—a test which predated their distinctively marked P-51s, but which they nonetheless passed with flying colours.
Red Tails renders Shingle and several other high-flying set pieces with the flair and polish you’d expect of a Lucasfilm production, and, for sheer spectacle, it boasts greater box office prospects than Spike Lee’s similarly well-intentioned, if ultimately ill-received Miracle at St. Anna. But the key measure of the film’s success is surely whether it does justice to the pioneering pilots that inspired it, and here the verdict is decidedly less positive.
Indeed, like most recent Lucasfilm releases, Red Tails couples the dab-handed visual effects work of Industrial Light & Magic with some comically ham-handed storytelling. Director Anthony Hemingway may have made his name in helping to infuse The Wire with its trademark gritty naturalism, but Red Tails is far closer in tone to Lucas’ signature brand of old-fashioned, wide-eyed naïveté. As such, the script is packed with declarative clunkers, often from bigoted whites who witness the Red Tails’ preternaturally skillful pilotry and hastily change their tunes. If Lucas’ enthusiasm to lionize his subjects is basically laudable, in these instances his endeavors achieve the unfortunate side effect of trivializing the challenges they faced.
The tenuous connective tissue between the film’s aerial episodes is the boilerplate friendship between Marty ‘Easy’ Julian (Nate Parker), Joe ‘Lightning’ Little (David Oyelowo), and a quintet of fellow flyboys who share a lively, fraternal camaraderie, but also a general failure to transcend their archetypal callsigns and become flesh-and-blood characters. Undoubtedly, the actual men on whom these bland composites are based deserve better, and Lucas’ attempts to turn the conversation toward budgets and box office takings are an unfortunate, patronizing distraction from that fact.