She’s everything that a big, bad wolf could want.
The H-Bomb: I think the perfect quick, straight to the point, TV Guide description of this movie would be, “’Little Red Riding Hood’ reworked for the ’Twilight’ age,” because that’s exactly what it is. The pretty, young female protagonist is caught in the middle of a love triangle. One of the male participants in the triangle bears a resemblance to a certain sparkling vampire. The big, bad wolf is now a big, bad werewolf. The whole thing has a heavy “emo” vibe to it. And, as icing on the cake, the director of the movie is Catherine Hardwicke, who also directed the original “Twilight“ film. What a shocker.
In addition to the “Twilight” similarities, “Red Riding Hood” also freely borrows elements from “The Crucible” as well as M. Night Shyamalamadingdong’s “The Village” as it expands the Brothers Grimm fairy tale into a feature length film. The setup is fairly simple, Valerie (Amanda Seyfried) is a blossoming young woman living in a small, medieval village. She is arranged to be married to Henry (Max Irons, Jeremy‘s son), while her heart truly belongs to the rugged Peter (Shiloh Fernandez).
So while that cheap ass soap opera plot is busy wasting the audience’s time, we find out that for two generations the village has been living in fear of a ferocious werewolf that lives somewhere in the surrounding woods. The villagers are so terrified of it that every time there’s a full moon, they leave animal sacrifices outside of their homes in the hopes that the beast won’t attack them.
For years this has worked, but then, one day, the wolf attacks, and Valerie’s older sister is killed. The local priest (Lukas Haas) summons Father Solomon (Gary Oldman), a famed werewolf slayer, to the village to slay the wolf. But that’s not good enough for the men of the village, the drunken, headstrong lot that they are, who instead decide to form a lynch mob in order to hunt down and kill the creature themselves.
They do indeed find a wolf in the cave where they believe it lives, and they do kill it, mounting it’s head on a stick and showing it off to the whole village. Shortly after, Solomon makes his fashionable entrance, with a posse of elite knights in tow, and informs these simple minded bumpkins that the wolf they killed is a regular wolf, and not a werewolf. They, being the simple minded bumpkins that they are, don’t believe him and decide to throw a gigantic, decadent party (bordering on mass orgy) for themselves.
Then the real werewolf crashes the party and kills several more of the villagers. Despite the valiant efforts of Solomon and his knights, the wolf gets away. Solomon vows to stay until he destroys it. However, his methods seem more likely to destroy the village instead, as he turns the people against each other by saying that the wolf is one of them, and by persecuting people he believes are practicing witchcraft.
Solomon’s suspicions then fall on Valerie after he is informed that she came face to face with the wolf and apparently was able to communicate with it. When others simply hear grunts and growls from it, she can actually hear words.
For everything “Red Riding Hood” has going for it; great visuals, strong performances, and a real sense of mystery, it just never really grabbed me. The biggest fault for me was the love triangle, a plot device so damn clichéd and overused that it’s flat out lazy. It gets just as much screen time as anything relating to the wolf, which is way too much and really brings the movie down. Looking at both of the young men vying for Valerie, I found that they were both a couple of fucking creeps, and that she could do better than either one. The three way romance thread just seemed to be there in order to stretch the story out to feature length, and every time the movie got into it, I got bored very quickly.
Also, this flick doesn’t really fly as a horror movie, either. It comes up empty handed on both scares and suspense, and as far as the mystery about the werewolf’s identity goes… I guessed it long before it was revealed. And again, thanks to director Hardwicke, who began her career on a very high note with “thirteen”, only to disappoint ever since, the whole thing just stinks of “Twilight”. I would’ve thought she’d want to go in a different direction after “Twilight”, but, she chose to ape her previous film instead. What a letdown. In addition to all that, the CGI werewolf looked like a CGI werewolf. In other words, it looked pretty damn fake.
But, all that said, the film isn’t terrible, and it gets a big boost from the performances. Seyfried is simply luminous as Valerie. Yeah, the script gave her almost nothing but tired crap to work with, but she played it well, and the camera is simply in love with her. This Li’l Red Riding Hood sure is lookin’ good. Oldman, as the seemingly heroic Solomon who becomes more villainous as things progress, once again delivers a standout turn. Why this man has not yet won an Oscar is simply mind boggling. He should have won several by now.
In addition to the actors, I also really liked the look of this film, even though it does look a lot like “Twilight”. The cinematographer and production designer definitely earned their paychecks with this one. The village and the forest had a very Tim Burton-esque look to them, and I mean that as a compliment. Another thing, the very famous “What big eyes you have. What big ears you have. What big teeth you have” is worked into the film in a fairly clever way. I got a chuckle out of it.
At the end of the day, “Red Riding Hood” just didn’t do it for me. Falling back on the stale love triangle idea was just inexcusable, there’s way too much Twilightiness for my liking, and the horror elements just weren‘t all that effective. If you’re a fan of “Twilight”, then for you this is a must see. For all the non-Twi-hards out there, not so much.
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