Red Tails (2012)

I have to say that I was a wee bit disappointed in this movie. I felt it was surprisingly mediocre and very “Hollywood”. The good parts are the flight scenes and the special effects. They are enjoyable to watch and reasonably well done. However, that is pretty much what makes up this movie in terms of enjoyment. I would say that a lot of it is not very realistic. The German anti-aircraft guns seems to be next to useless most of the time for instance. Also, there is the scene where a single P51, armed with nothing but machine guns, takes out an armed German warship in two quick runs. That felt quite unrealistic. A lot of the film also felt too much like some Hollywood drama. Some of the pilots behave like morons and in real life they would have been shot down rather quickly. The alcohol problems and the romance seems to have been thrown in just to appeal to the American soap-opera viewers. The entire movie is very shallow and if it was not for the budget and special effects it could very well have been a TV-movie. Most of this movie I was yawning in my seat and waking up only when the flight action started so that I could watch the special effects.

Yeah, I came into this long after seeing HBO's Tuskegee Airmen, which kind of stared everyone on earth and was brilliantly acted and had a great and compelling plot. So this is kind of a bias review. Compared to the HBO original movie, Red Tails has better special effects but that's about all. The story is worse, the plot is worse, the acting is worse. The history is worse, and I like to give movies a wide breath for artistic liberty. It tells a love story instead of a Tuskegee Airmen story. It replaces drama with fx. Walk away and dig up the HBO movie from the 90s.