Kurt Loder Reviews Haywire and Red Tails

Haywire is an old-school spy-versus-spy espionage tale. It would be nice if the story (scripted by Lem Dobbs, who previously wrote Soderbergh's Kafka and The Limey) made a little more sense; at some points you might wish it made any sense at all. Red Tails tells an important World War II story of brave black soldiers chafing at the constraints of government-enforced racial segregation. It's gratifying to finally see such a story told, with a complement of able black actors, in a movie to which the name of Tyler Perry is not appended. So it's too bad, writes Kurt Loder, that the picture is so resolutely old-fashioned, meanderingly paced, and afflicted with distracting absurdities.