Movie Review: Red Tails

Upon seeing the first few seconds of the trailer for Red Tails Southern Man proclaimed that it would be both good and bad "for all the same reasons that Pearl Harbor was good and bad" and he was pretty much right. It didn't help that those first few seconds incorporated more historical and logistical inaccuracies than one could quickly count. If that annoys you too much the HBO production of The Tuskegee Airmen (which features the younger version of Cuba Gooding Jr as a pilot rather than a commander) is a fine film and reasonably accurate portrayal of the history and deeds of the justifiably famous 332nd Fighter Group. But a friend pointed out that viewed as a live-action comic book Red Tails is a fine film, at least while in the air where you have lots of CGI airplanes shooting slow-motion bullets and performing variously impossible maneuvers while flying far too close to one another (and everything else) which is a lot of fun to watch. There's even a German arch-enemy ace clearly meant to stand in for Galland. The ground sequences are entirely forgettable and include a couple of subplots that could have been dispensed with entirely. I doubt that George will make his money back on this one but it's enough fun to be worthy of addition to the DVD collection when it comes out, shelved in the "movies about a parallel Earth in a conflict similar to WWII" section where it will have plenty of company.