There’s an oddly stiff quality to “Red Tails,” in which people often talk not like they’re living in the ’40s but like they’re living in a ’40s movie. But this story wasn’t told back then, when it was happening, and it deserves to be told now.
By CHRIS HEWITT
Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Minn.
A dandy story trumps iffy filmmaking in “Red Tails.”
It’s about the heroics of the “all-Negro” 332nd Fighter Group in World War II, which battled both the Nazis and racism. Often called into battle to protect bomber pilots who had just finished hurling racist epithets at them, the African-American Red Tails, so named because of the markings on their planes, stood up for a country that was mostly unwilling to stand up for them.
“Red Tails” uses suspenseful air battles and stirring boardroom skirmishes to draw us into its story. And even within the familiar incidences of prejudice — black officers not allowed to drink in an officers’ lounge, for instance — it finds surprising variations, such as a prison camp where many white inmates want to have nothing to do with a black newcomer.
Too often, though, “Red Tails” relies on cliched storytelling tricks. There is a perfunctory romance that goes straight from “Hi” to “I’ll love you forever.” And the foreshadowing is so obvious that theaters might as well install someone to sit next to you who’ll nudge you to make sure you noticed that the hot dog (charismatic David Oyelowo) who takes too many risks might be in danger or the squad leader who nips from a flask might have impaired judgment or the blind-in-one-eye pilot might be about to take a bad veer to the left.
There’s an oddly stiff quality to “Red Tails,” in which people often talk not like they’re living in the ’40s but like they’re living in a ’40s movie. But this story wasn’t told back then, when it was happening, and it deserves to be told now.