Red Tails is a turkey

FILM REVIEW

 

Red Tails
DIRECTED BY: Anthony Hemingway
STARRING: Terrence Howard, Cuba Gooding Jr, Bryan Cranston
CERT: 12A

The highlight at my local cinema this week is the Euro 2012 game on Thursday between Ireland and Spain. This is clearly a sports feature but it isn’t too hard to imagine that what unfolds could actually be a horror. Think of the children, lads. Think of the children.
Meanwhile, who knows what George Lucas was thinking. As usual.

He’s apparently been sitting on Red Tails for decades, the Hollywood studios having turned down the idea in the 1980s. Not surprising, if the script they saw back then was anything like the final draft. In any case, he’s finally dragged it to the screen, supposedly having spent 100 million quid of his own cash to do it. Which is either an admirable display of passion, or a reminder of that old proverb about an eejit and his money.

Red Tails is the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, a squadron of African American fighter pilots who distinguished themselves during World War 2, despite spending most of the conflict on the fringes and having to wage the segregation battle at the same time,­ including the widely held notion in the military that black soldiers lacked the courage, ambition, or mental capability to serve in combat.

This is the mentality Colonel AJ Bullard (Howard) and Major Emanuel Stance (Gooding Jr) are up against. Having fought to establish the all-black 332nd Fighter Group, the officers and their men should be out taking the fight to the Nazis on the front lines. Instead they’re relegated to flying worn-out planes on the odd mission to take out enemy convoys in Italy, shooting ducks in a barrel.

They get their break when they’re assigned to provide cover for bombers during the landing at Anzio and go on to accompany B17s on bombing missions over Germany, proving themselves against the Luftwaffe’s finest. In all, the Tuskegee squadron won nearly 100 Distinguished Flying Crosses and went home to a country that decided they were still the wrong colour.

This is a story that’s well worth the telling and deserves a great film. Unfortunately Red Tails is not that film. The script is dire, the dialogue embarrassingly corny and the characters not so much people as they are war comic caricatures, the kind of heroes and villains (especially the villains) you might have found in those Victor annuals when your were young. I know, because I had them all and the fighter pilot stories were my favourites. If I could have made a movie at the time (I drew enough pictures to at least make a cartoon), it might have looked a lot like Red Tails.

That’s the problem. The film Lucas has produced is a boy’s adventure tale, an old school war movie, most likely inspired by his own childhood sketching. Which is fine if you get a kick out of some decent aerial dog fights, but not so much if at the same time you’re hoping for something with the kind of depth that the Tuskegee legacy deserves.

The film’s failure to hit the right note is not for want of talent, except perhaps a screenwriter who might have been more adamant that Mr Lucas (never known for his writing skills) stop looking over his shoulder.

Howard and Gooding Jr are capable actors who give it plenty of welly and can’t be blamed for some of the unfortunate lines that come out of their mouths. Director Anthony Hemingway is no slouch either, having worked behind the camera on Treme and The Wire.

I suppose we all have our bad days and I imagine when George Lucas wants you to make Star Wars in 1940s Europe, all you can do is put the head down, plough on and hope for the best. Just be thankful that at least there are no jive-talking monsters named Jar Jar, so you won’t disgrace yourself entirely.

 

The Pact
DIRECTED BY: Nicholas McCarthy
STARRING: Caity Lotz, Agnes Bruckner, Casper Van Dien
CERT: 16

If Thursday night’s Terror in Gdansk doesn’t give you enough chills, then The Pact just might do the trick.

A low budget haunted house flick, it stars Caity Lotz as biker chick Annie, who reluctantly returns to the old homestead after the death of her mother and the sudden disappearance of her sister Nicole (Bruckner), who’s been missing since a spooky Skype chat with her young daughter.

It doesn’t take Annie long to cop on that she’s sharing the house with some supernatural guests and she enlists the dashing local cop (Van Dien) and a psychic medium (Haley Hudson) to help put the past to rest.

The writing is dodgy, some of the acting is poor and the leading lady does pretty much all of the dumb things a horror flick leading lady can do but there’s a few decent scares. If first-time writer/director Mr McCarthy can get a good handle on feature-length scripts (he adapted this from a fine short film of his own), then he’ll go on to make some good movies.