George Lucas has been talking about Red Tails for over twenty years now, so even when it hit theaters in 2012 – heck, even when it started filming – it was a shock, but one dulled by years of anticipation.  Passion projects like this often come true in disappointing ways, and when it finally hit screens as directed by Anthony Hemmingway and starring Cuba Gooding Jr., Terrence Howard and a host of actors from The Wire, there was no way it could live up to the build-up.  But that’s no excuse for the end results being dullish, other than some dogfighting sequences that are so rendered in CGI that they come across as weightless.  The film is not a disaster, but its positive message gets lost in hackneyed clichés.  Our review of the Blu-ray of Red Tails follows after the jump.

A week ago, the online community was in a tizzy when reports that the African American WWII airplane drama Red Tails was in a tailspin and that George Lucas would step it to make a hefty overhaul of the film in place of director Anthony Hemingway. Now, according to Nicole Sperling in the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly [via The Playlist], much of that was grossly exaggerated.  Sperling reports that the reshoots are quite normal and this is nothing out of the ordinary. Of course, how Lucas and company plan to get the cast back together is something of a mystery, if in fact these reshoots weren’t worked into the schedule beforehand.

For a deeper explanation of the madness and why this story might not quite be finished, hit the jump.