Red Riding Hood an Unintentionally Laughable Mess
Beautiful Valerie (Amanda Seyfried) is in love with the smolderingly sexy young, but poor, lumberjack Peter (Shiloh Fernandez) but betrothed by her parents Cesaire (Billy Burke) and Suzette (Virginia Madsen) to the wealthy blacksmith’s son Henry (Max Irons) much to her consternation. But when the town’s resident, usually peaceful, werewolf murders her older sister, everything is thrown out of balance, especially after local priest Father Auguste (Lukas Haas) invites notorious slayer of the supernatural Father Solomon (Gary Oldman) to help kill the beast.
Amanda Seyfried in Red Riding Hood © Warner Bros
Immediately two things become clear. The first is that everyone Valerie is close to, including Peter, Henry and her seemingly sweet and good-natured Grandmother (Julie Christie), is a suspect in regards to being the werewolf. The second is that the beast has its brown eyes set directly upon her, intent on transforming the young woman into a fellow creature born of the Blood Moon no matter what the cost.
A third thing that should be made even more crystalline than those two plot points is that director Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood, her follow up to Twilight, is the single worst film I have seen in 2011 so far. Laughably scripted by David Leslie Johnson (Orphan), filled with unintentionally hysterical dialogue that had the preview audience I saw it with in hysterics and woodenly acted by almost its entire usually reliable cast, this movie had me awestruck by just how terrible it proved to be.
I get what the thought behind this was. Why not make a feminist coming of age saga with a serious Stephenie Meyer bent based on one of Grimm’s most famous fairy tales? It’s not like Neil Jordan’s 1984 adaptation The Company of Wolves is all that talked about or remembered today, and for the life of me I can’t think of a single other version of merit save maybe 1911’s silent one with Mary Pickford (which I’ve never seen). This property seems like a safe bet to get those Team Edward and Team Jacob group members’ collective hearts aflutter, so Warner Bros. putting forth the financing to make it become a reality isn’t a surprise.
But the movie being just this unrelentingly awful is. This thing is so heavy-handed, so overly melodramatic, so unabashedly sensationalistic it’s almost like Hardwicke and Johnson were making it all up as filming went along. It’s like Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula made with a tenth of the talent and even less of an effort, the whole thing an operatically brain-dead aria where spectacle, speciousness and silliness collide to create something nigh unwatchable.
There’s so much more I could say I almost don’t know where to begin. From the wolf telepathically speaking to Valerie, to Peter pulling a Jacob and spending a good quarter of the film shirtless (and with perfect, twenty-first century hair), to a second act bit of girl-on-girl dirty dancing, to Father Auguste showing up in town with a gigantic bronze elephant that he literally cooks people within, so much of this borders on the asinine it boggles the mind. Worst of all, the majority of the cast, including Christie, who looks like she’d rather be anywhere else, wanders around as if bored, mumbling their lines with a matter-of-fact triteness that drove me nuts.
Oldman is a hoot, about that I cannot lie. He’s doing his best Anthony Hopkins Van Helsing impersonation, going over the top and not caring a lick that he’s doing it almost as if by doing so he managed to give himself a reason to care about the motion picture. His line readings drip with venom, spew emotion out of every syllable, and even though he’s just around to pick up a paycheck at least he’s doing it with a brazen bravado that’s worthy of a minor appreciative tip of the cap.
That’s it. I have no more praise to give. Red Riding Hood is a laughable mess from the word go, and by the time a main character lets Valerie in on the fact that they know what she did to the bunny I almost couldn’t keep myself from giggling. This is one of those movies where you wonder what in the world everyone involved was thinking, and I can’t imagine even the most devote Twi-hard ready to eat this pabulum up with a spoon the size of Mount Rainier won’t walk out of the theatre aghast.
Film Rating: 1/2ê (out of 4)
