------------------------------------------------------

 [ Official Movie Site ]

------------------------------------------------------

"Red Tails" squanders a great subject, reducing the real-life struggles and fierce heroics of the Tuskegee Airmen to rickety cliché. Some of the action's fun. But if something about that statement doesn't sound right, well, there's your chief problem with "Red Tails." It sets out to ingratiate without provocation or complexity.

This much can be said of producer George Lucas' long-gestating project: It avoids the aggravating Hollywood strategy of telling an African American story by way of a mass-marketable white protagonist, a la the Civil War drama "Glory." It's actually about the people it's about, in other words.

But Lucas has overseen a movie divided against itself, part "Clone Wars"-aesthetic kicks, part dutiful sociology. The script, confining the action to 1944 Italy, places the occasional grown-up sentiment in a character's mouth, as when one member of the 332nd Fighter Group tells another: "Don't be in a hurry to get to the killing part." Yet the movie can't wait to get to the killing part, rendered here in computer-generated aerial dogfights a little too in love with the available filmmaking technology and a little too disinterested in the characters doing the shooting.

The focus is on a fictional group of men stationed at Ramitelli Airfield. Hard-drinking squadron leader Marty "Easy" Julian (Nate Parker) is the by-the-book contrast to his best friend, the Jedi whiz of the bunch, Joe "Lightning" Little (David Oyelowo). Coffee, the chief mechanic, is played by Andre Royo, one of several supporting players who worked with director Anthony Hemingway on "The Wire." (Lucas himself directed the reshoots.) The marquee names belong to Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr., offering complementary portraits in unflappable leadership as a proud colonel and a pipe-smoking major, respectively.

Producer Lucas, director Hemingway and his writers, John Ridley and "Boondocks" creator Aaron McGruder, aren't going for serious business here. As McGruder said in the film's promotional materials, "Red Tails" offers "a comic-book feel that only George Lucas could bring to a film." He added: "Before this, we didn't have our John Wayne, but we now have that kind of larger-than-life treatment, and the Tuskegee Airmen deserve it."

Yes, and they also deserve some dramatic vitality and plausibility. If you go to "Red Tails" to learn anything (even heavily fictionalized things) about the origin of the Tuskegee Airmen or the workaday racism they had to endure, you will be disappointed. When Howard's defiant colonel upbraids the Pentagon brass over their disdain for his men, the sequence is straight out of a comic book, per co-writer McGruder's description. But if we can't believe a scene such as this one would ever have happened that way, not in a million Earth years, then there's no real gratification in it.

Little romances a local beauty, while Julian loses faith in his leadership skills. Sick of being sidelined and marginalized in the war, the men of the 332nd finally get the equipment and the approval they need to prove themselves in the air, primarily as protection for bombers delivering their payloads. But "Red Tails" runs into serious storytelling snags, particularly in its episodic second half. The writing is self-conscious in the extreme, whether spoken by Germans ("My God!" says the nemesis the Red Tails nickname "Pretty Boy" — "those pilots are African!") or a white American prisoner of war ("I guess there's a lot more to you coloreds than we thought") or a fellow pilot of the 332nd Fighter Group ("Congratulations, Captain — you are the first Negro to shoot down a Jerry!").

The actors do all they can. But Lucas and company did not get the script right with this one, which is the single, dubious link "Red Tails" has to "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull."

 [ Official Movie Site ]

------------------------------------------------------

 [ Official Movie Site ]

------------------------------------------------------

"War Horse," Steven Spielberg's epic family drama about the enduring connection between a boy and his horse and the Great War that tears them apart, has the sweep of a classic John Ford movie, the sentiment of Frank Capra and a spirited steed named Joey who will steal your heart. The film itself is more difficult to love.

The emotional signature of the director can be felt from the first frames as he establishes the relationship and the mood of the piece — there will be tears. The setting is rural England on the eve of the First World War, the moors and all their harsh beauty made gorgeous by cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, a longtime Spielberg collaborator, who uses the same painterly touch whether the scene is pastoral or decimated by war.

A colt is being born in the field and a teenager, who turns out to be Albert Narracott (Jeremy Irvine in his feature film debut), crouches in the distance, awed by the sight. His father (Peter Mullan) is a forgotten war hero whose memories have turned him into a drunk. Salt-of-the-earth mum, Rosie (Emily Watson), as solid as the ground she stands on, has been worn down by the trials of the land and her husband's soggy state.

Time passes — slowly. The horse grows up with Albert still looking on at a distance, until his dad, sent to buy a plow horse, comes back with a pub buzz, empty pockets and the untrained 2-year-old. Never one to underplay his hand, Spielberg leaves little doubt that Albert's and Joey's fates are sealed. War, battles, other riders and other challenges will come and go, but nothing short of death can break their bond.

Essentially screenwriters Lee Hall ("Billy Elliot") and Richard Curtis ("Love Actually" and the "Bridget Jones" films) have given us the purest sort of love story. In structure, it follows the three-act basics of most romantic comedies or dramas — they meet, they are separated, they struggle to find their way back to each other. In tone, "War Horse" is a symphony in minor key (with composer John Williams playing those chords with a very heavy hand) to the unconditional and unwavering love that animals extend us, long a film staple, with the distinctive relationship with horses in particular yielding a rich vein that includes "National Velvet," "The Black Stallion," "The Horse Whisperer," "Seabiscuit" and countless others.

Adapted from the 1982 children's novel by Michael Morpurgo, "War Horse" was a sensation on stage from its London premiere in 2009 to its New York opening earlier this year, with the horses brought to stunning life as giant puppets. Without those visual theatrics, the screenwriters shift more focus on the people that surround Joey, their worries and woes trying hard to stack up to the noble steed's. In that, the filmmakers have sometimes succeeded and sometimes stumbled, with the earlier scenes beautiful but flat and too many subplots, ranging from landlords to flirtations, that don't pay off. Even Irvine, who as Albert is both Joey's soul mate and his destiny, isn't given the sort of gravitas needed to seriously break your heart.

Things pick up considerably when the colt is sold to the military, and with that comes a new string of characters and a series of action set pieces that are as exhilarating as they are devastating. War — battle-hot or postwar cold, reality or fantasy — has always brought out the best in Spielberg, and so it is with "War Horse." A cavalry charge filled with the sound and fury of a hundred soldiers, their swords flashing, their horses racing breakneck across a field, is unbridled passion at top speed. Even the muddy trenches of France, its battlefields coiled by barbed wire, men hollowed out by the fighting, is brought to life with Spielbergian grace.

Joey's war years begin with a gentleman soldier, Capt. Nicholls (sensitively drawn by Tom Hiddleston), who has promised to care for Albert's horse and spends time between skirmishes making sketches to send back to the boy. In France there is a succession of owners, endless forced marches, huge German howitzers to haul and other hardships. Whatever happens to the humans in this war-torn, devastated landscape, it is the animals whose pain we feel most keenly.

Which is to say, Joey owns nearly every good scene in this movie, whether he is being hidden by a charming French farm girl (Celine Buckens) and her grandfather (Niels Arestrup) or in the care of German soldiers, everyone ups their game in his presence (with 14 horses used to create that life at various stages). The incredible emotive power of this horse and the way in which the filmmakers were able to translate it on-screen are what stay with you.

There is great beauty in "War Horse," great power in the emotional journey for both boy and beast, if only Spielberg had trusted that we would be able to read between the lines.

 [ Official Movie Site ]

------------------------------------------------------

It's not like "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" was ever going to be "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm." Not even close.

As readers of the Stieg Larsson novel and viewers of the recent Swedish film version know all too well, what's on offer is a bleak and savage story of crime and punishment that features generous portions of sadistic rape, twisted torture and murders that can charitably be called grotesque.

Still, adding David Fincher — the director of "Seven," "Zodiac" and "Fight Club" — to the mix has proved counterproductive.

Fincher is without doubt a gifted, uncompromising filmmaker with enviable skill and exceptional collaborators, here including screenwriter Steven Zaillian and cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth. And as the director says of his films in his press bio, "He hopes that people like them, but if they don't, it's not for lack of effort."

Though Fincher's gift for disturbing, twist-the-knife cinema made him the obvious Hollywood choice, using him here feels, in a coals-to-Newcastle way, like shipping truckloads of ice to the far reaches of the polar regions. More than that, it betrays a misunderstanding of what's at the heart of the phenomenal international success of the Millennium trilogy books, which clock in at 65 million copies and counting.

That would be the character of Lisbeth Salander, one of the most unlikely, idiosyncratic and compelling crime fighters to hit the scene since Sherlock Holmes. One reason Salander is catnip on the page is that she is anything but in real life. Antisocial when she's not downright furious, a sullen 24-year-old computer hacker with more piercings than friends, she is fierce, furtive and feral. You never want to get in her way.

Though less well-crafted than the Fincher version, Niel Arden Oplev's "Dragon Tattoo" did have the crucial advantage of actress Noomi Rapace. Her savage Salander was as skittish and tattooed as she should be, but there was always a sense of an actual person inside those fierce defenses that enabled audiences to connect on screen in the way readers do on the page.

Playing Salander this time around is Rooney Mara, an intense young actress who had a fine scene with Jesse Eisenberg's Mark Zuckerberg at the opening of Fincher's excellent "The Social Network." She committed herself totally to the "Dragon Tattoo" role and clearly did everything her director asked of her, but this film's cold, almost robotic conception of Salander as a twitchy, anorexic waif feels more like a stunt than a complete character, and so the best part of the reason we care enough to endure all that mayhem has gone away.

Before Salander appears on the scene, "Dragon Tattoo" introduces its nominal protagonist, Millennium magazine journalist Mikael Blomkvist, played with relentless surliness by an effective Daniel Craig. A crusader for truth against the bloated capitalists of the world (and likely Larsson's version of himself), Blomkvist is not having the best of days.

The journalist has found himself on the losing end of a libel verdict. Facing imprisonment and wanting to take a break from his magazine, Blomkvist is receptive when he gets a phone call from an attorney saying that one of Sweden's most powerful men wants to see him.

That would be Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), a retired industrialist who lives on the family-owned Hedeby Island a few hours north of Stockholm and has, in his own words, "spent half of my life investigating the events of a single day."

Those events, which have something of the flavor of a classic locked-room mystery, involve the disappearance of Vanger's favorite niece, Harriet. On the day in question, when a bridge accident made leaving the island impossible, 16-year-old Harriet simply vanished. Vanger not only suspects she was murdered, he thinks it was done by a member of his family, and he wants Blomkvist to put his investigative reporting skills to work finding the truth.

So the journalist moves into a frigid cabin on the island, abandoning his it-works-for-us relationship with his married publisher (Robin Wright) and starts making charts and tacking photos onto the wall like he was one of the hard-core Baltimore cops on "The Wire."

Circumstances soon make Blomkvist aware of Salander and her particular skill set, and he convinces her to work with him. She is having deep troubles of her own, including a vicious sexual predator who thinks she is an easy mark (ha!). The Salander-Blomkvist collaboration is good for both them and the film.

Screenwriter Zaillian has adroitly pared down the 500-plus-page book (the chatter about a change to the ending is a tempest in a teapot) and what's on screen also benefits from the work of "Social Network" collaborators including production designer Donald Graham Burt, editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall and composers Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross. But unlike that film, which profited from Eisenberg's humanity in a not particularly human role, "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" is too frigid around the heart to be really effective.

 [ Official Movie Site ]

------------------------------------------------------