Red Tails

Red Tails tells the combat story of the 332^nd Fighter Group, an Army Air Corps unit notable for the fact that its pilots were graduates of the Tuskegee Airmen program.  It was an all-black unit assigned, initially, to undemanding flying well back from the fight in the European theater.  The film dramatizes their commanding officer’s fight to get them in the war, and it lauds their remarkable success once he succeeded.  It’s a great story and one worth reading.  Unfortunately, Red Tails isn’t a particularly good film.

Even though Red Tails looks professional and its air combat sequences are sure to thrill anyone with an interest in that sort of thing, the film simply can’t overcome its leaden screenplay and one-note performances.  Its villains, American and German, are ridiculous stereotypes who induce more groans than fist-shaking.  Its heroes end the film no more heroic than they began it.  Everyone speaks dialogue so clunky that we spend half the running time wondering how much better the film could have been with a first-class screenwriter.  Nobody changes, nobody grows.  A bunch of stuff happens to a bunch of good guys.  At the end of the film, they’re just a bunch of good guys who went through a lot of stuff.

This is a shame, really, because Red Tails is such a labor of love.  Producer George Lucas worked for years to get this film made, finally fronting his own money to pay for its production and distribution.  Some shots in the film are direct recreations of archive photos of the 332^nd.  This film clearly worships them men it depicts but, by presenting them so unidimensionally, it short-serves them.

I wanted to like Red Tails.  I’ll probably show it to my boys and I hope they love it.  But its characters aren’t rich enough, its story not complex enough to do justice to the real-life heroes it lionizes.  Too bad.

American Gangster

AMERICAN GANGSTER is smart, carefully made, and vastly entertaining. With Denzel Washington and Russel Crowe toplining, and Ridley Scott directing, I wouldn't expect anything else.

In the film, Denzel Washington plays Frank Lucas, the guy whose idea it was to ship heroin to the U.S. in the coffins of KIAs returning from Vietnam. Crowe plays Richie Roberts, the detective who finally figures it all out. Interesting enough, but, as is so often the case, it's all in the execution.

And the execution is first rate. Washington and Crowe are two of the best actors working today, and it's always a pleasure to watch them do their thing. Scott took the time to put together a marvelous simulacrum of Vietnam - era New York, populate it with believable people, and make it come alive. I bought into the world of this film, I bought into the people living in this world, and I lost track of time as I grew engrossed in their world.

This is good stuff, team.