Red Tails: To See or Not To See
This review of Red Tails is two things: a straight movie review, followed by a series of observations about how the film is being presented to people beyond its cinematic value.
Simply, the movie is not good. It is riddled with cliché, predictable and short on character development. The script is littered with utterly laughable, expository dialogue that real people in the same situations wouldn’t have, due in no small part that the story was created by a hack writer and a screenplay written by said hack with the creator of the Boondocks comic strip tagging along for reasons that remain unknown, or at least never appeared onscreen. While I think it was commendable - even noble - for the unfathomably rich George Lucas to have hired black writers to tell this story, I have to ask, couldn’t he find anyone more talented than the guy who wrote Undercover Brother and created the Barbershop TV series, who was then matched up with the most successful writer of buffoonery in modern times? Was no one else available? Is Spike Lee fresh out of black film school interns? In any event the script sucks, and a slavish rendering of it by the cast and crew leaves us with a movie that limps across the finish line. This movie had all of the elements in place it needed to be a good film, save for a script that should have been jettisoned from the cockpit before the wheels even got off the runway.
Also, despite the hype, Red Tails does not in fact feature an all-star cast. It does not “star” Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding, Jr. (the largest names being bandied about). While the roster has a number of fine actors on it, they mostly consist of B-listers who happen to avail themselves well-enough of the opportunity afforded here. Shout-outs should go to the two actual leads, who did the best job they could with the material given: Nate Parker, who gives the best Denzel Washington imitation I’ve seen in years (and if the reaction of women in the theater is any indication, he nailed it); and the covertly British David Oyelowo who I’ve been following since his days on MI-5 and whom I am glad is receiving a larger following (though having been in blockbusters The Help and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, as well as the forthcoming Lincoln, he ain’t exactly hurting for work on our side of the pond).
Being that this is a war movie, certain tropes are destined to pop-up: the hotshot pilot who won’t follow orders, the young kid whose job isn’t to fly planes so much as to confront audiences with the irony of sending babies into war, the colonel who puts his career on the line for “his” men, the newly married man who simply must die for the relationship to have any resonance (because lord knows the script doesn’t allow for it)…it’s all here in spades (no pun intended). In almost eye-rolling fashion the film tries too hard to convince audiences of the soldiers’ merits by further adding an unnecessary love story and a POW prison break straight out of Hogan’s Heroes. It eats up audience patience and screen time by cramming in typical war movie fare in blackface trying to convince us of the merits of the soldiers when they could have been developing characters whose names I’d remember by allowing us more than tongue scrapes of their personalities.
That’s about all the movie review you need if you’re just considering whether or not to see it for its entertainment value. It is largely the same in scope as the 1995 HBO Tuskegee Airmen movie, which actually had an all-star cast, solid acting and decent writing. I would go so far as to say that even at a fraction of the budget of Red Tails, it is the superior film. Not a perfect film, but certainly a better one. It even netted Laurence Fishburne a Golden Globe acting nomination…an achievement Lucas hasn’t been able to buy yet and this film won’t come within a mile of.
All of which is to say, I struggle to understand why anyone felt this film needed to be made. On this point I find myself in the self-loathing position of agreeing with Hollywood executives: why should they pay for the same story twice? Sure they do it with robots and white folks, but those films make money. Why should they do it with a WWII story about black people when they already did it fifteen years ago with roughly the same production values? I doubt that’s the bottom line for many of the people Lucas ended up talking to,* but it would certainly be my question. Did Lucas think the 1995 film sucked? Did he feel it deserved a wider audience, so let’s make another one that will at least start out in theaters? Does he hold that there can’t be too many Tuskegee Airmen movies to choose from? And instead of saying he hasn’t been able to get Hollywood to support a Tuskegee Airmen film for the past 23 years, why not point out that for the last 15 of those 23 years they already had one (and that it won awards)? Do the Tuskegee Airmen have a super PAC that eventually wants a weekly television series so that they can never be forgotten between Black History Months? I get that people feel this story should be told. I agree with that sentiment and that goal. But if you had asked me if there was a film about the Tuskegee Airmen that you could watch that had real actors in it with some semblance of historical accuracy**, that wasn’t boring and had at least a decent level of entertainment value, I already had that film to recommend. I’ve had it for 15 years. Where was George Lucas in 1995? What was his pitch for the last 15 years? “I want to do the Tuskegee Airmen, but with better explosions”? Was it just his pride? Trying to understand why George Lucas had a hard time getting this film made doesn’t take a Jedi mind trick to figure out.
Which brings me to the shame of this film and its politics. If you just wanted to know if you should wait to see this on DVD, you have my permission as a black man to do so.
Tyler Perry, whom I have the most fascinating love/hate relationship with (meaning I love to talk about how much I hate his films and what they represent), sent out a missive to the internet this past week essentially imploring audiences to go see Red Tails. In his words, “movies starring an all African American cast are on the verge of becoming extinct.”
Is this the problem we are seeking to fix by supporting Red Tails? If Lucas’s point is that studios don’t think films with black casts are commercially viable, that’s not news. Spike Lee’s been saying that since 1989, maintaining that Hollywood could be forced to work in black film’s interest, which he set out to do by creating black films that people might spend a lot of money on, thus generating more interest and opportunities for black filmmakers and actors. Lee was enormously successful in this regard, almost out the gate. Sadly, it was an opportunity largely wasted with an exceeding glut of sub-par movies (by Lee and others) that sent black filmmakers running to the Hollywood hills in search of work of any color, and thus one level of the goal was realized (to make black cast and crew members a more common cog of the Hollywood machine) while failing on the more visible and impacting aspects of the goal (good black stories being told by talented black people in mainstream platforms). But does seeing Red Tails put this mission back on track? Absolutely not, and I think it’s laughable that Lucas is making points about black film business like someone just told him about it yesterday. My barber knows as much about how Hollywood handles black film, and that was before he started selling bootlegs.
Let’s be clear: there is nothing preventing Lucas or Perry or any other rich black film abolitionist from accomplishing this goal right now. Either of them could easily drop or raise a million dollars apiece on ten really good black indie projects right now and reinvigorate the “mission” of black cinema. Since 2005 Tyler Perry has directed 2-3 movies per year. He has generated over $500 million dollars in five years, much of it retread material from his stage plays. Instead of asking me to spend $12 a pop on a film that will likely suck to make a political point so you can get more work, why don’t you spend some of your summer vacation home money and help create that movement? We BOTH win that game.
If the goal of Red Tails was to share the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, then that mission was accomplished the minute the film was edited. I don’t have to go see the film for that mission to be fulfilled. Thank you, George Lucas, for adding a film to the Black History Month canon for all Februarys moving forward. But if the goal was to create more black films, supporting Red Tails doesn’t guarantee that goal will ever be achieved no matter how much money it makes. It is wholly possible that if the film does well it could have the opposite effect. If it does well, will the next crop of black films trying to bank on Red Tails’ success have Lucas as a shepherd? The answer is no, and don’t think Hollywood won’t bring that up at your next pitch meeting. You can’t guilt trip Hollywood. The film industry has no shame. People should stop telling you to see Red Tails because it will help the Tyler Perrys of the world and just stick to, “We really think you should get to know the story of the Tuskegee Airmen.” THAT is a reason I can get behind. THAT would have compelled me to go see it anyway. But any other reason than that is disingenuous or is just plain ignorant about how the industry works. And if the film tanks, we’re no worse off than we were before. George Lucas might be, but not black cinema. In fact, we (black folks) get a(nother) Tuskegee Airmen film out of the deal. Happy Kwanzaa!
Black folks have been here before. I would argue that we are always “here”. Black folks almost exclusively supported the black film boom of the early 90s. We in turn messed that up by supporting too many bad films. We, as an audience, were in no position to argue with Hollywood to create good black film short of deciding whether or not to spend our money on what films did exist. And that’s not going to change. It is this very idea that you do have a say at that level that is giving me an ulcer right now. Black film isn’t on the verge of extinction, as Perry puts it. If anything Perry has done more to stall the development of black cinema than anybody holding Hollywood’s purse strings by continuing to release disposable black films. Black film has been at its artistic best when Hollywood had little or nothing to do with it. Hollywood didn’t give us To Sleep with Anger or Eve’s Bayou or Daughters of the Dust or The Caveman’s Valentine; black filmmakers who stuck to their guns did. If you want to help black cinema, go see a film that cost $1 million dollars to make and is showing at the local art house theater (if they’re lucky). You’ll probably get a better film than any of the ones by Perry or Lucas, the popcorn is essentially the same, and you’ll genuinely be helping build a movement, not puff up the George Lucas sandbox.
Don’t let Tyler Perry or George Lucas or your mother’s well-meaning email convince you that you should go see Red Tails out of some duty to black cinema, or on the suggestion that if you make this one a financial success that you’ll see more black films (especially ones about black historical figures, which is another ridiculous misconception in this whole debate). Go see it because you want to see it, or because you’d like to get a crash course about an undervalued slice of heroic Americana, or because you like war movies.
Black cinema will be fine either way.
* Their bottom line is more like “Black audiences = $25-30 million on average. This film cost $100 million. No thanks.”
** How do you NOT put in the Eleanor Roosevelt flight scene, Red Tails?