Friday, March 11, 2011 at 10:51AM Movie Review - 'Red Riding Hood'
| Red Riding Hood
Starring Amanda Seyfried, Gary Oldman, Shiloh Fernandez, Max Irons  |
It may seem a bit unfair that pretty much any discussion of Red Riding Hood is going to compare it to Twilight, but such a comparison is hard to resist. Director Catherine Hardwicke directed both films—though, it's important to note, she wrote neither—and she's doing a fine job of putting herself into a tight little cliche of a box all on her own. Her previous film featured vampires, and this current one features werewolves. I'd be putting my money on the next one having zombies in it, if her next two projects weren't already listed on her IMDB page. I suppose "thinly-veiled abstinence allegory about zombies" just wouldn't sell, although these days, who knows. Red Riding Hood, as told by screenwriter David Johnson, is an amalgamation of previous iterations of the fairy tale, with Hardwicke's overbearing themes from Twilight layered heavily on top. Though many aspects of the film's story will seem new and different to those of us who are familiar with the Brothers Grimm telling of it, Wikipedia makes it clear that most of them are picked from earlier versions of the fable. Here the title character is named Valerie (Amanda Seyfried), and she lives in what amounts to a cheaper-looking version of The Village. The whole film appears to have been shot on sound stages, with generic "snowy forest" backdrops behind the straw huts, and cartoonishly spiky trees populating the area around it. When Valerie walks through the forest to go visit her grandmother (Julie Christie), I half expected one of the trees to start throwing apples at her. Valerie, it should come as no surprise, is torn between two boys. There's Peter (Shiloh Fernandez), who she's known—and loved—all her life. She wants to be with him, but he's just a lowly woodsman, and her parents (Billy Burke and Virginia Madsen) want more for her. They've arranged for her to marry Henry (Max Irons), who's a blacksmith, which is apparently a much more noble (and money-generating) profession. The contrast between the two boys is laughably exaggerated. Peter has spiky hair, and is constantly squinting and snarling and scowling. He's the Bad Boy who all women, apparently, really want. Henry, on the other hand, has big friendly eyes and always has a boyish blank look on his face. His hair is usually tussled in a cute way. Girls don't want the Cute Nice Guy. Obviously. Neither of these relationships is developed much, though their contrast forms the basis of much of the story. Peter exists to represent temptation and to show us what a tease Valerie can be. These two are really into barely touching the tips of their noses together, but until it's time for us to learn that Bad Things Happen When You Give In To Dirty Sexual Desires, they never so much as kiss. Henry is just there to be sweet and gullible and to make us feel sorry for him when he does the chivalrous thing, which is pretty much all he ever does. The people of Daggerhorn (that's the village) have a problem. For a long time they've been hounded by a wolf that comes every full moon to eat someone or something. For the past 20 years, if they leave their best livestock out for it, they have peace. But suddenly they find that the wolf has killed a villager, and so they set out to kill it. (Why this thought never occurred to them during the previous 20 years, I'm not sure.) Their local priest (Lukas Haas) calls in the cavalry to help: Father Solomon (Gary Oldman) arrives with his caravan of wolf-hunters. It seems Solomon has some experience in the matter, and he's here to explain everything to the audience—er, I mean, the villagers. Oldman is always a pleasure to watch: he's one of the true chameleons of modern-day cinema; every role he takes on is completely distinct and unique. That's the case here too, and Father Solomon is the most distinguished character. But even Gary Oldman can't overcome a script that has him there almost exclusively to tell us what's going on, and direction that has him repeatedly shouting out his lines while standing in the middle of a circle of villagers. It turns out that the wolf is actually a werewolf—a cheesy CGI rendering of one, at that—and the murderer is one of the villagers. Red Riding Hood then becomes a game of Guess the Wolf: here's a beat to make you think it's this character, here's one to make you think it's that character. And finally, inevitably, the werewolf reveals itself, and we're treated to what has become the most generic cliche of the past 15 or so years: a long explanation of motives and clarification of the events that have happened up to that point, complete with flashbacks that reveal what was hidden from us the first time through. It's a game of Clue where we as an audience don't have enough evidence to draw our own conclusions. All we know is that the movie is jerking us around the whole time, and thus the surprise revelation cannot be anything other than a letdown. Hardwicke's choice of material with Red Riding Hood is hardly surprising. Though the story lends itself to her favorite themes of abstinence and resisting temptation (and indeed, that's a common reading of the classical versions of the fairy tale), her take on them is so heavy-handed that it pulls you out of the movie. This is true, also, of the pieces of the fable that were apparently felt to be compulsory inclusions. "What big teeth you have" must be uttered, so a contrived dream sequence is shoved in as an excuse to do so. One telling had the wolf being filled with rocks so it'd sink to the bottom of a lake, and so we get an all-too-long (and fairly gross) take on this as well. But the biggest problem is that the film is so singularly-focused and transparent in its aim that its big climactic line is "I'll wait for you." It made me wish these kids would just screw and get it over with already, wolf or no wolf.
Reader Comments (5)
I spilled my coffee on my lap when I saw "I half expected one of the trees to start throwing apples at her."
I Haven had a laugh like that in ages.
Glad to hear somebody appreciated that one. :)
I SAW THIS MOVIE LAST NIGHT. DON'T WASTE YOUR MONEY. IT SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN LABELED HORROR, AS IT WAS NOT EVEN REMOTELY SCARY. IN MANY PLACES IT WAS LAUGHABLE. TWILIGHT?? IT DOES NOT EVEN COME CLOSE.
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