The story of the Tuskegee airmen is absolutely one worth telling. The extraordinarily patriotic and brave African-American pilots who stood up against Jim Crow and a segregated military for the honor of flying pursuit planes for their country are heroic pioneers who deserve mentioning alongside Rosa Parks and Jackie Robinson.

Nazi fighters and flak guns weren’t their only opponents. Plenty of American officers felt that black pilots were genetically inferior to their white counterparts, equipped with slower reflexes and lower reserves of courage. When the Tuskegee pilots were formed into the 332nd Fighter Group and sent to the Mediterranean for combat duty, the Pentagon was watching them far more carefully than Nazi radar ever would.

As a depiction of these skilled and brave men, “Red Tails” is certainly reverent enough. And the movie’s old-fashioned enough that much of it feels like classic old dogfighting movies like “Flying Leathernecks” or “Fighter Squadron.”

In fact, “Red Tails” is just one script rewrite and one music score away from being a pretty good movie.

The movie is set in 1944 when the pilots of the 332nd have been consigned to sideshow missions. They fly old and worn-out P-40 Warhawks and spend their days strafing German trucks. Their odds of seeing an actual German plane seem to be nil.

But their commanding officer Col. A.J. Bullard (played by Terrence Howard and clearly modeled on Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., the Red Tails’ fabled real-life commander) has flown to Washington to plead their case. Give the 332nd new planes and assign them to escort heavy bombers, he says, and he can cut American losses by a whopping 70 percent. He butts heads with a racist colonel Bryan Cranston, “Breaking Bad”) but pulls it off.

And so the Red Tails are issued the sexiest plane ever built, the P-51 Mustang, and assigned to escort huge flights of B-17 Flying Fortresses deep into Germany and hopefully draw attention to the fact that they’re exceptionally good pilots.

The screenplay, credited to John Ridley and Aaron McGruder, is a sturdy construct that’s served well in a dozen movies: group of soldiers is doubted by high command, group of soldiers kicks ass, high command showers them with medals. Hell, it worked in “Stripes.”

But the screenplay is on shaky ground as it casts about for verisimilitude and gravitas, with archetypes and ciphers being the rule. Cuba Gooding Jr. acquits himself well as a pipe-smoking second in command determined to keep his men proud even as the higher-ups hand them grunt work. Nate Parker is Easy, the by-the-book element leader with a drinking problem. David Oyelowo is Lightning, the ladies’ man who’s also the best pilot in the group and who has a sweet romance with an Italian girl. And there’s the religious guy. And the young baby-face guy everyone calls Junior. And the good old boy who always has a plug of tobacco wedged firmly under his lip.

Except for being black, these are all types we’ve seen before in countless other movies. There’s some pleasure in the familiarity, but there’s also disappointment because we know early on who’s not going to make it home.

The movie also has one of the more bizarre opening credits sequences in recent memory that depicts Nazi fighters cutting up U.S. bomber formations while escorting Mustangs flown by white pilots go haring off after German fighters, leaving their charges defenseless. The credits are laid over this in the dullest and ugliest font you’ve ever seen, and the entire thing feels like a PowerPoint presentation cut together by a 14 year old.

This can likely be laid at the feet of Anthony Hemingway, the film’s director. He’s helmed plenty of TV episodes, but this is his first feature as director, and it shows. He’s reluctant to cut anything, and as a result, several sequences feel padded. He also has the white crews of American bombers serving as an expository Greek chorus, shouting out cringe-inducing things like “Boy, those Red Tails are great!” and “I’m sure glad those Red Tails are with us on this mission!” You can practically feel Hemingway standing behind you, tapping you on the back and whispering “Do you get it?” Yeah, I get it.

A special note about the score: It’s awful. Terence Blanchard is a great trumpeter and bandleader and has written terrific scores for films like “Malcolm X” and “Inside Man,” but he has absolutely no idea how to compose a score for a big, sprawling, old-timey movie. The score actually kicks in to four-on-the-floor during a scene when the Red Tails are taking off, and to call it jarring is an understatement. Great composer, but wrong for this movie.

George Lucas produced the film with his own money, including prints and distribution costs totaling about $93 million of his petty cash. According to him, he was forced to do it because no studio would make such an expensive film with an all-black cast because there’s no foreign market for it. But given the film’s spectacular and thrilling aerial sequences, I suspect “Red Tails” will do just fine overseas. Industrial Light & Magic’s digital artists are the best in the business, and it shows. The dogfights are riveting, and the sound design matches the visuals, with the mighty thrum of piston-engine fighters roaring and bouncing around the theater.

If only it could have been as exciting and moving on the ground as it was in the air.

Jason Heck is Ink’s film critic. He is co-host of “The DVD Gurus” with the University of Missouri-Kansas City film professor Mitch Brian for “Up to Date” on KCUR 89.3 FM. Reach him at inkmovieskc@gmail.com.