Underworld: Awakening; Haywire; Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Red Tails; Coriolanus; Carnage; Redline

Red Tails

by Martin R. "Vargo" Schneider

EXPECTATIONS: You know who I feel bad for? Anthony Hemingway. Why? Because you don't know who that is. There's really no reason for you to recognize his name, because he's not particularly famous, but he is the actual director of Red Tails. Despite that, everyone is making a big deal out of calling this George Lucas' movie. There's probably logic behind that. I mean, Lucas wanted this movie to happen so much, he paid for it with $58 million of his own money, which sounds impressive until you remember that this is George freaking Lucas, and he has made that money back while you were reading this paragraph.

So the real reason for this is that everyone loves to talk about how much they hate George Lucas. The Internet is full of people who manufacture shallow reasons to hate George Lucas for "ruining Star Wars" because they can't really admit to themselves that they didn't actually like Star Wars all that much to begin with. Because of all of this vitriol being slung its way by neckbeards, I am praying that this movie is good, so we can feel superior.

REALITY: I don't even know what to say here. From the first five minutes, this film clearly knows what it's going to be. There's ridiculously cheesy Casio synthesizer background music and title credits that look like they were made in MS Paint. It looks like a big-budget remake of one of those movies Junior High teachers check out from the library to put on when there's a substitute. (Hint: It is.) Because this movie has "Seventh Grade History Class" written all over it, and as a result of my court-mandated public service volunteering with the Boys and Girls Club, I took Current Releases' Junior Correspondent Tommy Simmons, Age 8, with me. Here's Tommy.

Wasn't I already in this movie?Hello, my name is Tommy Simmons. This is my report on the movie Red Tails. I thought this movie was going to be dumb because it's about history but then I learned that it's made by the Star Wars guy, and he made that cool back-flipping Yoda and I really like The Clone Wars, so I thought maybe it would be good.

Red Tails is about a bunch of pilots in World War I or III or something who are Black, and they're the first Black pilots in America. There are two main characters, Marty "Easy" Julian (Nate Parker) and Joe "Lightning" Little (David Oyelowo). They are best friends, but Easy is in charge of the pilots. Lightning doesn't ever listen to him though, and I'm pretty sure he should have been kicked out or sent to the principal's office or something. The pilots are bored because they don't ever get to fight, so their boss, the guy from Iron Man, goes to Washington to make it so they can fight even though Colonel Honky (Bryan Cranston) doesn't want them to. Then they start helping the white pilots, and the white pilots don't like them but then they do. Lightning meets a girl because he flies by her and then finds her house. They fall in love and this is a war movie, so we pretty much knew what was going to happen. Also, someone gets kidnapped because he shouldn't have been flying, but he flies anyway because Easy said it was okay.

Why didn't I get a green hat?

Some parts of this movie are pretty good. The fights between the planes are really exciting, but there are a lot of things going on in this movie that aren't fighting planes. There are like three different stories at once, and there are a ton of characters and not much of anything is happening. The bad guys are like cartoon characters, so I thought Red Tails was a comic book movie. And every character that's not one of the Black pilots talks like a stormtrooper from Star Wars, not like a Stormtrooper from Hitler, which is what they're supposed to sound like. They all sound like "Here come the Red Tails! I don't like them! Oh wait, I guess I like them." And the bad guys are all like "I'll get those Red Tails!" and the Red Tails are all like "We're so cool, we talk like it's 2011 even though we're way back in the past!"

When Red Tails gets going, it's pretty interesting, but then it goes on forever. When one character gets in a crash, I was supposed to be sad, but I couldn't really remember which one he was. This is the same thing I said about the Transformers movie, and I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to care more about people dying than robots dying. When this movie is good, it's not totally boring. When this movie is bad, it's like "Holy Cow, how could you think that was good enough to go into a movie?" bad. The planes are really, really cool, though.

And that's how George Lucas ended racism forever.

MINORITY REPORT: Racism is solved! - Nobody, Ever