Director Anthony Hemingway
Starring Cuba Gooding Jr., Gerald McRaney, David Oyelowo
Rated PG-13
Score 3/6

A crew of African American pilots in the Tuskegee training program, having faced segregation while kept mostly on the ground during World War II, are called into duty under the guidance of Col. A.J. Bullard.

At the time I vaguely remember seeing the trailer, probably on YouTube but it seems that Red Tails never got a cinematic release in Australia. For those of you who might be interested Cuba Gooding Jr. previously been in the 1995 movie Tuskegee Airmen which was directed by Robert Markowitz while Terrence Howard has previously portrayed a Tuskegee Airman in the 2002 movie Hart’s War directed by Gregory Hoblit.

To the best of my recollection there is a difference between this and the 1995 movie. The ’95 version told the unit’s story from flight school all the way until they joined the European theatre of war whereas Red Tails starts with the unit serving in Italy. It should also be noted that Red Tails is one of those movies where it says that it is inspired by actual events.
Red Tails has solid ensemble cast and I enjoyed the onscreen chemistry between David Oyelowo and Andre Royo who portrayed 1st Lt. Joe “Lightning” Little and 1st Sgt. “Coffee” Coleman. As you would expect from Luscasfilm aerial combat sequences are very impressive and they take up a large portion of the overall runtime of the movie also only to be expected, considering that this is about a unit in the United States Army Air Forces in World War II. However, this did not give some of the other important plot points to fully develop, like the romance between “Lightning” and an Italian girl Sofia Daniela Ruah or how a pilot who was shot down got back to his unit after escaping from a prisoner of war camp.