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67
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Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
As long as it stays in the air, Red Tails is a compelling sky-war pageant of a movie. On the ground, it's a far shakier experience: dutiful and prosaic, with thinly scripted episodes that don't add up to a satisfying story.
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63
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Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
Red Tails is entertaining. Audiences are likely to enjoy it. The scenes of aerial combat are skillfully done and exciting.
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63
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USA Today Claudia Puig
David Oyelowo stands out as the daredevil Joe "Lightning" Little, the unit's best flier. With his bravery and bravado, he's the film's most complex character.
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63
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Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
There isn't a real, flesh-and-blood figure in the bunch. Everything about Red Tails - the breaking down of racial barriers, the military achievements, the courage and sacrifice - is diminished in the process.
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50
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Boston Globe Wesley Morris
The movie is so desperate to be palatable, to appeal to everybody that it doesn't taste like anything.
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50
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Rolling Stone Peter Travers
You leave Red Tails thinking of what might have been instead of what is a missed opportunity.
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40
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The New York Times Stephen Holden
To say that this live-action comic book lives up to Mr. Lucas's description is not a wholehearted endorsement. Are teenage boys as naïve today as they were 60 or more years ago? And much of the dialogue is groaningly clunky. But so it was back then.
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40
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Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
One could argue that the target audience - black teenagers, Mr. Lucas has said - might be most receptive to a film that conveys history through contemporary entertainment. But this isn't contemporary entertainment, it's antiquated kitsch reprocessed by the producer's nostalgia for the movies of his boyhood. The story has been stripped of historical context - don't black teenagers and everyone else deserve hard facts? - and internal logic.
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38
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Washington Post
The war-movie cliches are as abundant as the antiaircraft fire, and the dialogue as wooden as a balsa glider. The leading characters are issued one personality trait apiece, and some don't even get that. Cuba Gooding Jr., for example, plays Maj. Emanuelle Stance as a man who smokes a pipe.
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25
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San Francisco Chronicle Amy Biancolli
What's missing is any hint of realism. There's no grit to it anywhere.
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company.