We like these guys.  The fliers and ground support of Red Tails, also fictional, are mostly war movie types some with colorful tics or descriptive nicknames, like Declan “Winky“ Hall (Leslie Odom. Jr.), Leon “Neon“ Edwards (Kevin Phillips), Andrew “Smoky“ Salem (Neyo), Antwan “Coffee“ Coleman (Andre Royo) and Samuel “Joker“ George (Elijah Kelley). Among the more notable of the bunch, for personality and screen time, are squadron leader Marty “Easy” Julian (Nate Parker), who likes whiskey; Ray “Junior” Gannon (Tristan Wills), who’d rather be “Senior” and whose back row status makes him chamf even more at the bit; and Joe “Lightning” Little (David Oylelowo), the charismatic star pilot, daredevil and lover-boy of the group. (Lightning, a great magnetic character, played with lots of swagger and pizzazz by Oylelowo, is the equivalent to someone like Steve McQueen as “Cooler King” Hilts in The Great Escape, the guy a lot of us wanted to be when we were kids and saw that movie.)

There’s no suspense about what’s going to happen in Red Tails overall, except over who lives and who dies. (Suspense enough for some, I guess). We know who won the war and we aren’t really worried about the Tuskegee group as a whole. So our pleasure in the movie comes from following characters we like though hazardous situations that we know not all will survive.Howard’s Bullard, who’s no go-along guy, keeps up the pressure to get his men their shot and make nonsense out of that “report.” And finally, the brass relents, and the Airmen get to fly (in special signature planes with red-painted tails), and of course they prove themselves magnificently. Some die, some live, and almost all get their moments in the sun and in the exploding skies, in Lucas-style dogfights that look like William Wellman’s Wings crossed with Star Wars. Those fights are, all by themselves, almost enough to recommend this movie, especially if you were a kid who loved the better buddy-buddy war movies like  The Great Escape. (If you did, there’s an escape here too, by impatient Junior, from “Stalag 18” — the one after Stalag 17, of course.)

Writers John Ridley (U-Turn) and Aaron McGruder (Boondocks) don’t try to give these characters, either the officers or the men — or their sometimes supportive white colleagues (played by Bryan Cranston, Gerald McRaney and others) — too much depth or nuance. They try to make them all likable or pungent movie star or character types. They do. It would have been nice if the movie achieved great drama as well as great action. It doesn’t.

Still, Lucas and company — the writers and director Anthony Hemingway (TV‘s well-liked The Wire and CSI:NY) try harder in those areas, psychology and sociology and history,  that most action films tend to skimp on. (Here, Lucas reportedly pitched in on some of the action.)  But,  by telling even a part of the Tuskegee Airmen story, and putting it in a big movie package pitched toward a big audience, with a huge gallery of characters, multiple storylines and dozens of speaking parts, Lucas, and Hemingway and the others, are showing more ambition, trying harder, maybe failing sometimes, but still deserving of that ordinary people’s applause I heard at the screening. I may have wanted to be a Cooler King when I was a kid, so why should we begrudge all those kids today who’d like to be Lightning?

By the way, here’s a salute to the Tuskegee Airmen. They deserve our best — which is probably the whole point of the arguments about the movie. The box-office  argument too.

THIS MEANS WAR (Also Blu-ray) Two Stars

U.S.: McG, 2012 (20th Century Fox)

Let me try to do this one in 25 words or less:

McG’s This Means War: Reese Witherspoon torn between CIA super-agents and ex-pals Chris Pine and Tom Hardy. Ultra-slick. Techno-happy. Obnoxious rom-com. Overblown action. Don’t bother.

There. That’s 25 — counting hyphenated words as one-word. Betcha thought I couldn’t do it.

Extras: Commentary by McG; Three alternate endings with commentary by McG; Deleted scenes with commentary by McG; Gag reel; Trailer (with no commentary by McG).

mmm

PONY EXPRESS Two and a Half Stars

U.S.: Jerry Hopper, 1953 (Olive)

Charlton Heston plays Buffalo Bill, Forrest Tucker is Wild Bill Hickcock, and Rhonda Fleming and Jan Sterling are the womenfolk — the sophisticated belle and the faithful cowgal — in this fanciful account of how the Pony Express stretched from St. Joe to Sacramento, with the help of the two Bills, and despite all kinds of gunplay and chicanery. This is the same kind of historical mish-mash Cecil B. DeMille made in his ’30s westerns, Union Pacific and  The Plainsman, the latter of which also matched Buffalo Bill and Hickcock, and brought in Custer, Lincoln and Calamity Jane as well. But Pony Express, while just as absurd, lacks the DeMille shows’ style and pizzazz.

It’s not very good either, though western buffs will find Pony Express interesting, and it’s actually better than lots of the stuff I see new in the theatres. Western specialist Charles Marquis Warren wrote the screenplay, and this was in his heyday, when he was not only writing movies, but doing one of TV’s most popular shows (it eventually dethroned “I Love Lucy”), “Gunsmoke.” “Gunsmoke” was kind of the “Seinfeld” of Westerns, a talky show with four recurring gabbers who had lots of personality, sitting around, often doing nothing but confabbing with each other, and Marquis Warren has to have set the tone for that. Here, there’s a lot of talk too and Heston plays one of his arrogant dude roles, which are always fun to watch. It’s also interesting to see Jan Serling’s self-sacrificing honey here, only two years after she was a memorable scheming bitch in Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole. The director is journeyman Jerry Hopper (The Private War of Major Benson), who at least doesn’t annoy you.

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