Review of Red Tails (2012) by Ciaobaby — 20 Jan 2012

The CGI was pretty good (it's distracting in the trailer). The action scenes are excellent. But.....everything else is BAD!. Don't take my word for it, take the word of the critic sitting next me me that said it sounds like a 12-year old wrote this.

That's giving it too much credit. My 8-year old could have written the dialogue. I can't decide if the dialogue made the acting bad, or bad acting made the bad dialogue even worse. But the lead character "Easy" has no emotional investment in anything he says, does, or sees.

And on top of everything else the filmmakers have scored the film within an inch of it's life. For the first 20-minutes the film is score and dialogue that is so, crisp it sounds like it was all recorded in a vacuum.

There is no foley or ambient noise...it's actually distractingly weird. The 3rd act of the film is supposed to be emotionally resonant but it falls flat.....it's a build up to nothing. I'm also wondering if a key plot or subplot was removed from the film as there are two indications.

First, Bryan Cranston disappears completely and never comes back. Second, when Gerald McRainey give a big speech, it's all ADR and you only see the back side of his head (It's a bizarre shot, which leads me to believe it was the only angle they had where McRainey's mouth couldn't be seen).

If they were re-writing this script to fix it in post, can you imagine how bad the shooting draft must have been. Overall 2/5 stars. Good luck with this one.