Red Tails (2012)

Wonderfully offbeat film!

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

¨ A crew of African American pilots in the Tuskegee training program, having faced segregation while kept mostly on the ground during World War II, are called into duty under the guidance of Col. A.J. Bullard. ¨ I feel as though reading that part alone makes the movie a great movie because there are not a lot of movies with the starring roles as african american black men as the stars . The movies talks about segregation and how bad it was during WWll , A black getting together with a white women, the black men getting crappy material, treated bad by other WHITE pilots and etc. and to watch that movie and see that they didn't want help during the war, why were they trying to belittle them and trying to deny them the right to fly . SO I think this was a Great movie !

I'm not an American so the whole: The Black Experience thing, while not completely opaque, is tortuously arcane to my mind. Yeah I understand they feel bad about slavery and then they feel kind of warm and fuzzy about going to war to end it only to feel bad again about Georgia and then worse about the subsequent extermination of the indigenous American population but you know, the frequent bouts of indulgent guilt and ostensible virtue yanks are prone to over the topic, kinda makes me wanna puke. So it was with more than minor trepidation that I approached Red Tails, being certain that it were yet another touchy feely exploration of The Black Experience. Yet there were signs that things might be different, bad reviews in the dreary media hinting that it might've ruffled a few feathers.Eh ehem, yes it ruffled a few feathers alright but alas, not through dint of any much needed puncturing of the bloated moralising and mawkish sentimentality that normally accompanies The Black Experience. Oh no, we get mawkish and moralistic aplenty, possibly packed more densely into each painful minute of screen time than I've ever seen. It get's worse, it's actually genuinely offensive, I was astounded. I couldn't believe it but the script slanders actual war time fighter pilots in the most egregious manner, portraying them as glory hounds, reckless and irresponsible towards their compatriots.There's so much more though, hokey one liners from contrite white folk expressing their new found admiration for the darker compatriots, that are so vomit inducing I can't bring myself to quote them. A portrayal of the enemy personified through a character that goes beyond stereotype in a way that truly breaks new ground. The sloppy second unit work, where the director can't be bothered to move the camera or even the jeep, in two scenes that are supposed to be separated by weeks. Let's not even mention the aircraft to which the laws of physics and aerodynamics don't apply.Such a shame, could've been a great film, there is one saving grace though, the CGI is pretty good.

Too much greatness for fans of the B-17, too much greatness for winning WWII for the American, too much awesome for dog-fights, too much coolness for a call-back to 'the great escape'. I'm done here.... you don;t like this, I'm fine with that, however it;s a 10/10 as only Lucas can pull off.

"Red Tails" is terrible, sometimes hilariously terrible, though I really couldn't enjoy the movie for its ineptitude because it's an affront to the real men who fought. I knew the movie had a bad reputation but I figured at least the aerial battles would be good, but no, they just looked like a video game and the pilots were doing all the wrong things. There were some good performances, but Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr. just phoned it in. They probably knew from the script that the movie was a dog. Such a shame.I plan to see "The Tuskegee Airmen" soon; hope it's a lot better than this!