"Red Tails" Review

    Cuba, please, know it off with the pipe. It looks ridiculous. This is Red Tails!

    Red Tails could've been a lot worse than it is. I'm sure that some of the people that see Red Tails will like it. In fact, I believe that if you only see four or five movies a year, you'll love Red Tails. That being said, if you do only see four or five movies a year, Red Tails should not be one of them.
    Red Tails is based off of the noble goal to tell the tale of the Tuskegee Airmen, a group of black fighter pilots in WWII, who most people (Myself included) had never heard of before this film was released. They deserve a better film. The inherent problem with the film is that it's given an incredible real-life story and decides to tell a terrible mundane story with it. The Airmen are all reduced to one-dimensional stereotypes. There's the insecure leader. The cocky best friend. The rookie. The one that sings. The one that sound exactly like Chris Tucker. Terrence Howard plays the commander with a heart of gold, hard on the Airmen, but he really just wants them to be the best they can be. Cuba Gooding Jr, an actor I usually like, offers up a downright terrible performance as nothing more than a mash-up of military cliches.

I've always wondered if the other pilots even see
these things. 

    None of the actors excel in their roles and are lucky if they even get to have a story. There are so many characters that they just disappear when they are no longer needed. What happen to the pilot that crashed and survived? The Italian girl's mother? Where the hell did Bryan Cranston go? They give characters pointless storylines that go nowhere. Was it really necessary to shoehorn in a love story? Or a prison escape?
    The one area the movie does particularly well in is the dogfights. No, they aren't that great, but the special effects sure do look nice and colorful. They seriously can look very pretty, though I don't think they were really going for pretty-looking. The main "villain" of the film is a hilariously-bad German pilot. He shows up in all four dogfights in the film (2 hours long and only four dogfights? Come on movie) with a new batch of soldiers following him, the Red Tails blow up all his men, his plane always get nearly destroyed, but not all the was destroyed and he flies away until the next dogfight. He reminds me most of a Saturday morning cartoon villain. You can almost hear him shout "Drat! I'll get you Red Tails! I'll be back!" as he flies away.
   

Well there's your problem.

    And yet between all the flaws, I still can't say I hated Red Tails. Sure, it's not a very good movie, but it never is offensively bad. The acting is bad, the story is cliched at best, the dogfight only look nice and not much else. But still, I feel like other people (Many the ones who don't watch 3-4 movies a week like me) will get a kick out of Red Tails. And trust me, your kids will love it. Red Tails gets 3 stars of of 6.