Red Tails Review

If you haven't figured it out by now, George Lucas is playing with his toys, on his terms. He has been at least since The Phantom Menace was released in 1999, and what that means is when you go see one of his movies it's his way or the highway. And this is certainly the case with Red Tails, Lucas' new World War II fighter pilot drama that plays as defiantly out of touch and awkwardly conceived as the worst of the Star Wars prequels.

The failure of Red Tails is doubly confounding given the long gestation period of the film. The true-life tale of the pioneering Tuskegee Airmen -- the first group of African-American military pilots in the U.S. -- has been a passion project of Lucas' since the late 1980s. That the script -- credited to John Ridley and Aaron McGruder -- for a film that has been in some form of development for over 20 years should be so stilted and, well, dumb simply boggles the mind.

Producer Rick McCallum talks the making of Red Tails.

Nate Parker and David Oyelowo lead an ostensibly ensemble cast (ostensibly because most of this group have very little to do) as Marty "Easy" Julian and Joe "Lightning" Little, friends and frontmen of their flying squadron who fight for equality in the armed services even as they battle Hitler's aces in the sky. It goes like this: Easy plays by the rules, and doesn't take risks in life or in the sky, while Lightning flies by the seat of his pants, attacking enemy battleships on a whim and romancing a local gal in the Italian countryside… who he first meets via eye contact from the air!

So it's that kind of movie then, a paint-by-numbers drama that is less Saving Private Ryan than it is John Wayne cheesefest meets The Dam Busters. The picture, mostly bloodless, constantly innocuous, is clearly aimed at a pre-teen crowd, and you know, there's nothing wrong with that. But the naivete of the characters and the story, the aw-shucks mindset with which Lucas approaches this presumably rich material -- however misguided -- does not excuse the clunky dialogue and generally stiff performances that are on display.

Of course, Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr. are also in the cast as a pair of officers who lead our pilots on the ground, but their roles are hardly extensive, and while they bring their typical professional sheen to their scenes, there's ultimately very little they can do to save Red Tails. And don't be fooled by the presence of Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston in the ad campaign; his turn as a racist colonel feels more like a few pick-up shots than it does a fully integrated part of the film.


The flying sequences -- and there are, thankfully, a lot of them -- are certainly decently rendered and sometimes exciting. But they don't come across like they're depicting a World War II movie; it all just looks too high tech. It's as if a bunch of Y-wing fighters were launched into battle against the Germans.

Perhaps the real problem with those effects sequences, though, is the lack of real stakes. It's hard to get behind the action when we don't particularly give a hoot about most of the characters in the cockpits, and when their exploits often play as so perfunctory. The travails of the group as they deal with racism are awkward asides with no real impact. An alcoholism subplot involving Easy rings particularly false, and a POW storyline late in the film comes from out of left field. Seemingly straight out of the Hogan's Heroes writer's room, in fact.

Red Tails is a movie that I was really hoping to get behind. I think Lucas has taken more than his share of bruises over the past 13 years, and it would've been nice to see him make a creative comeback with a project that's clearly close to his heart. But this story, and the real-life guys it's meant to be about, deserve better.


Scott Collura is a Movies Editor at IGN. Sometimes he watches stuff. You can follow him on Twitter at @ScottIGN.

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