“The Red Baron”

Written and Directed by Nikolai Müllerschön

Starring: Matthias Schweighöfer, Til Schweiger, Lena Headey & Joseph Fiennes

Running Time: 106 min.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

From Peanuts to frozen pizza, the Red Baron continues to be a part of America’s cultural consciousness. The same cannot be said in Germany where, for obvious reasons, they tend to play down their war heroes. Perhaps that is why a film celebrating the life and work of World War I flying ace Manfred von Richthofen met with a cool critical reception when it opened in the Fatherland.

As far back as he can remember, von Richthofen (Matthias Schweighöfer) always wanted to be a crack aerialist, but this biopic only gives us one Hallmark greeting card glimpse into his childhood. We open on a young Manfred drawing a bead on a deer. A plane passes overhead and in an instant, the budding aviator is on horseback, arms outstretched and pretending to soar through the heavens.

The Huns depicted in “The Red Baron” are gallant charmers, not airborne killing machines. “We’re sportsmen, not butchers,” von Richthofen informs a gathering of rookie pilots. Before bragging that he shot down Canadian Capt. Roy Brown (Joseph Fiennes), von Richthofen is the first to come to the aid of the wounded airman. His famed Flying Circus arranges a flyby to drop a wreath at an enemy funeral. As if to make clear to uninformed viewers that Nazis didn’t arrive on the scene until World War II, writer/director Nikolai Müllerschön gives the Baron a Jew for a best friend.

Budgeted at $25 million, “The Red Baron” is said to be one of the costliest films ever produced in Germany. At times, the wavering CG scale replicas flying overhead seem more like giant pterodactyls than two-seater airplanes.

My knowledge of the real-life exploits of the Red Baron are limited to what I took from John Guillermin’s “The Blue Max,” Roger Corman’s “Von Richthofen and Brown” and the Royal Guardsman ditty. I’ll have to take the word of fellow critics who claim that the romantic relationship between the pilot and his nurse (Lena Headey) never took place.

As the daring fighter pilot, Matthias Schweighöfer has the swagger but lacks the charisma needed to pull it off. Co-star Til Schweiger (Sgt. Hugo Stiglitz in “Inglourious Basterds”) would have been a much better choice for the lead.

For all its faults, “The Red Baron” is a good old-fashioned genre picture that held my interest. Sadly, I won’t know until the DVD comes out exactly where to rank the film. Monterey Media’s version is 23 minutes shorter than the original German cut, which probably accounts