Red Riding Hood Review

Red Riding Hood (or shall we call it Twi-lite?) finds very little inspiration from its source material, but there are enough recognizable elements to perhaps justify the title.  In truth, Red Riding Hood is more like New Moon via the Brothers Grimm, emphasis on the former.  All the familiar pieces are in place: a generally passive heroine caught in a love triangle with two seemingly ideal suitors, supernatural elements threatening to bring her happiness crashing down, and lots of passionate staring and glaring as the denizens of town go about their business while being motivated at least as much by unrealized lust as suffocating fear.

Amanda Seyfried, with her otherworldly beauty and heaving chest, is a perfect leading lady, but that's not necessarily a compliment.  Her considerable talent is put to waste as Valerie, the hot girl in town who everyone is interested in, for one reason or another.  Seyfried captures the ridiculous intensity and internalizes it, creating an interesting screen presence where there's no right to be.  It's a testament to her skill that Valerie serves as an interesting enough protagonist to make such a bad movie oddly bearable, though by the time things are sorted out, it's difficult to really care about her fate.

That said, the story doesn't unfold as cleanly and predictably as one might think.  I felt like an unskilled Clue player, making guess after guess as to the wolf's identity, and the big reveal left me a bit confused but also satisfied that the film went with an answer strange enough to serve as a surprise and, to a degree, justify some of the film's most eye-rolling elements, such as Valerie's ability to communicate with the wolf.

The wolf itself is a disappointment, too similar to New Moon's lupine hunks, but also not as impressive as those creations.  There's something a bit too cartoony, even cuddly to the wolf's design, an instance of visual discord that is characteristic of the film.  The village, the woods, the cabins all look to either be constructed for a fairly high-budget theme park or based on a Thomas Kinkade painting.  It's the stuff of second-hand fairy tales, like Hoodwinked come to life (though Hoodwinked is made of far more entertaining stuff), at times so distracting as to overshadow whatever action is occurring onscreen.

Most of said "action" consists of Valerie caught in passionate (or passionately dispassionate) exchanges with her two beaus, bad-boy childhood sweetheart Peter (Shiloh Fernandez) and sweet fiance with a heart of gold despite Valerie's lack of interest Henry (Max Irons).  There's plenty of smolder to the romancing, and it's easier to see why such eligible bachelors would vie for her affections (boring Bella she is not), but Valerie's ultimate choice is perhaps too obvious, only in doubt for a moment if at all.

Deserving special mention is the gloriously awkward dance scene, which underscores the film's horrific musical direction and provides the characters to act like jealous teenagers in some sort of bisexual nightclub instead of jealous teenagers in some stupid sylvan village.

The film is at its worst when Gary Oldman's werewolf hunter Solomon comes to town in one of the most unintentionally hilarious processions ever put to film.  That the elephant statue is actually a torture chamber is even funnier, and even more of a sign of what a misguided character Solomon is, so awfully conceived that Oldman can't even glean anything worthwhile from him.  With Solomon's crazed leadership and supposed expertise, the town becomes even more obnoxiously paranoid and ridiculous, and a film that started pretty low to the ground manages to go even further downhill.  It's an unfortunate, but at least still interesting, plummet.