Reduces a story of triumph over racial prejudice to a standard gung-ho war movie.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 23, 2023

In the end, this movie is exciting to watch, but it's otherwise exceedingly bland. Red Tails simply doesn't do justice to its source material.

| Mar 24, 2021

It's a film that deserves an audience and for its story to be heard.

| Original Score: 2.5/4.0 | Sep 21, 2020

See the thing with Red Tails is that it really isn't that great of the movie. So if you go unless you don't have a decent standard of movie taste you most likely won't like and will be left wanting more.

| Original Score: C- | Jan 11, 2020

A strangely tedious and astoundingly underwhelming piece which lacks any real substance or punch.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 8, 2019

The first black U.S. fighter pilots rained down bullets on Hitler's Luftwaffe like borax upon cockroaches. A movie finally bringing that fact to light, all these years later, is by definition a good movie.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 3, 2016

George Lucas's last big hurrah is a hackneyed ode to a group of heroes-the Tuskegee Airmen-who deserve better treatment than this clich interrupted by dazzling, FX-laden dogfights, smoke-filled explosions, boring subplots, and oxygen-depleting dialogue.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 11, 2015

One longs for more scenes between the ensemble on the ground, but the emphasis on aerial (and digital) technology leaves the characters without context.

| Nov 5, 2013

A patriotic but blatantly unremarkable film that could have been much much more.

| Original Score: 1.5/5 | Jun 30, 2013

The actors' convincing portrayals and realistic bond with each other, along with the spectacular visual and sound effects created by Lucas, makes Red Tails feel genuine and powerful.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Jan 29, 2013

With an inspiring source story, talented actors, and one of the most profitable production companies backing the film, it's genuinely hard to imagine where it all went wrong.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 30, 2012

There certainly is an interesting story to be told at the heart of "Red Tails," but unfortunately director Anthony Hemingway and screenwriters John Ridley and Aaron McGruder couldn't get at it.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 17, 2012

Red Tails is all broad strokes, and I have to admit that it stroked me good.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Aug 22, 2012

This is a proper war film. That's to say one with crazy dogfights and (no, really) Nazis with prominent scars.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 11, 2012

The finished product makes a great case, perhaps the best yet filmed, for remaining anonymous and achieving nothing.

| Jun 10, 2012

Why, one wonders, didn't Lucas persuade his friend Steven Spielberg to take on this subject and treat it with the authority and respect he brought to Band of Brothers?

| Jun 10, 2012

The actors do their best, but the lines they have to deliver are toe-curlingly bad. Things get better when the planes are in the air, but the film's aerial dogfights are so blatantly computer-generated that the action fails to thrill.

| Jun 8, 2012

What a missed opportunity.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 8, 2012

While the film soars in the skies, on the ground there's nothing original in the script.

| Jun 8, 2012

It's an inspirational story and its infectious sense of camaraderie may well be an effective recruitment film for the U.S. air force.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 7, 2012