Producer George Lucas has spent more than 20 years hoping to make a movie about the Tuskegee Airmen, the first African-American U.S. military pilots. Leave it to the creator of Star Wars to turn the true story of that famed squadron’s World War II heroics into a larger-than-life myth.

Red Tails plays, as Lucas himself has noted in interviews leading up its release, like some pseudo-propagandist, let’s-all-rally-around-our-boys-in-uniform picture made in 1942. War is not hell on these battlefields; war is a man’s chance to prove his worth. The plotline is dead simple, as are each of the one-dimensional characters’ emotional motivations, and the script is full of groan-inducing patches of gee-whiz dialogue.

So I’m left to ask myself why I didn’t hate it.

Where Red Tails succeeds is in the camaraderie between its pilots. These are good men — each with his own bag of quirks and foibles purchased from the Acme Warehouse of Stock Character Traits — whom we enjoy watching work together in a common cause. It reminds me a little of the secret sauce at the center of Aaron Sorkin’s TV dramas The West Wing and Sports Night: it’s fun to spend time with a group of dedicated professionals who have interesting jobs and clearly enjoy what they do.

The significant difference, of course, between Red Tails and the sort of movie it’s been modeled on — Lucas has mentioned the John Wayne vehicle Flying Leathernecks — is its largely black cast. Perhaps then, in choosing to produce such a hokey film, Lucas and his collaborators are making a point about how African-American soldiers are due the same recognition that white soldiers received, including the distinction of being portrayed in mawkishly sentimental Hollywood fare.

The trouble in pursuing this retrograde strategy is that our modern cinematic tastes are too tainted by the steady diet of detached irony dominant today to take it seriously. Lucas and director Anthony Hemingway want so badly to paint these men as heroes that they face no substantial conflict or setbacks. The most difficult circumstances are overcome, or brushed aside, just a scene later.

When they run up against the racist attitudes of superior officers at the Pentagon, or are treated like pariahs by white soldiers, the Tuskegee Airmen are able to quickly change the prevailing attitudes by running one ridiculously successful air mission after another. Any drama is quickly sapped away.

Even most of the fight scenes, with dozens of planes darting in all directions across the screen while trading fire with their Nazi enemies over the Italian countryside, lack suspense. As with the movie’s romantic subplot as well, the story is so predictable as to preclude feeling genuine joy or sorrow as it all plays out.

And our heroes deserve better than our ho-hum indifference.