Geekscape Movie Reviews: Red Riding Hood
Hey Catherine, Warner Bros is on the phone. They were wondering if you could gross $195 million for them like you did for Summit with Twilight in 2008? Here’s the catch, you need to do it with a young beautiful girl, that’s being pursued by two equally hot guys, incorporate a supernatural baddie, throw in a PG 13 sex scene, and have some stupid dialogue. Interested?
Can I have a vampire?
No, that’s been done to death, but you can have a werewolf and we’ll even throw in your pal Billy Burke as the protective Dad.
Red Riding Hood stars Amanda Seyfried (Letters to Juliet, Mamma Mia!) who plays Valerie, a beautiful young woman torn between two young men. One is her childhood friend Peter (Shiloh Fernandez) the lowly woodcutter, and the other, her parent’s choice, who have arranged for her to marry the wealthy blacksmith Henry (Max Irons).
Valerie and Peter decide to run off with each other but just before they leave a cry is taken up in the village, and they learn that Valerie’s older sister has been killed by the werewolf. Hungry for revenge, the people call on religious zealot and werewolf hunter, Father Solomon (Gary Oldman), to help kill the wolf. Solomon’s grandiose arrival with big metal elephant contraption in tow brings new knowledge, that the werewolf is actually a human living amongst them, and that any one of them could be it including Valerie’s lover Peter.
With an interesting cast that includes already mentioned Amanda Seyfried, and Gary Oldman, there is also Academy Award winner Julie Christie (Harry Potter, Troy) as the mysterious and loving Grandma, Billy Burke (Drive Angry 3D, Twilight Series) as what else – the protective dad, Michael Shanks (Stargate SG1, Smallville) plays the other Dad, the perpetual cranky looking Michael Hogan (Battlestar Gallatica, Smallville) and Academy Award Nominee Virginia Madsen (Sideways, Candyman). When combined you’d think they would make for a good cast – but how wrong I was in the expectation.
The two wet noodles of the Red Riding Hood – Max Irons & Shiloh Fernandez
I’m usually positive and forgiving in my reviews especially when it comes to science fiction and or fantasy but there’s not much of anything to say positive about Red Riding Hood. The story seems sort of interesting, in at least it had potential (me trying to be positive).
Gary Oldman stars as Solomon the werewolf hunter who has a take no prisoners’ attitude. His acting is a bit over the top with none of the subtlety he exhibited back in the day when he played Count Dracula in Dracula (1992) and only as much horror as a PG13 will allow (so not much). He’s usually really good in everything he performs in (recent Batman movies) and this time, he is still the best part of this complete disaster (me trying to be positive again).
Seyfried and Oldman wearing the only coats in the perpetually snowing film.
There are a few moments when you could forgive the camera being out of focus, or the dollar store flowers that were strewn over the very fake and always snowing set, yet the cast was dressed for spring. The only “coat” in the movie is Valerie’s red cape, and Gary Oldman’s purple cape he wears in his opening sequence yet it’s snowing like 90% of the time in the film.
The suspense and story that leads up to the great reveal of exactly who is the werewolf, wasn’t all bad, and not entirely predictable but other than that, the entire movie was a hot mess.
The dialogue is stunted and comical and laugh out loud stupid. The writers went so far as to include, “Grandma,… what big teeth you have… what big ears you have…” Blahhhh, puke!
They had this dance-scene (yes – a medieval village celebration), I don’t even know what to call it, where three people were dancing with pig masks on, and a person with a wolf mask ran by and “blows” them down, -utterly beyond stupidity. They could have made it a musical and that wouldn’t have made it worse.
Still I wanted to like this film as I am a glutton for punishment and give it every opportunity to redeem itself, in someway.
The beginning of their passionate make-out session.
Seyfried has a pseudo sex scene where she is dry humping Fernandez and I thought I was watching really bad soft-porn. The scene is absolutely ridiculous. It’s like director Hardwicke said, time to do your big love scene. This is your star crossed lover that you may never see again. You have to marry this other guy you don’t love… now act it out. They basically fall on each other in a barn in front of a fire (ya right) and make-out atop the “soft granary hay.” Seyfried spreads her legs like she’s taking in an elephant. Sorry to be so graphic – but I mean it’s really terrible acting and I had to double check that PG13 rating, as they remain fully clothed but were totally going for it!
No, it’s not Bella with a bad dye job – it’s Valerie and Peter.
There are shots of sun light filtering through the trees that look exactly like shots in the first Twilight movie as well as numerous landscape shots. There are blue colored flowers throughout the film that are exactly the same shade of blue flowers in the Twilight movie’s meadow scene… which may sound asinine listing here, but item after item – this film is a bad rip off of Twilight except that it’s technically not a rip off since many key departments worked on both films so they are just repeating themselves and instead of doing something original they stay unimaginative and safe.
Perhaps Hardwicke had some sort of flash back and thought she was still working on Twilight, that’s how similar the films are visually and technically. One way that they do differ, is that Twilight had a cool soundtrack, this film not so much.
Even though this film has countless similarities to Twilight – it fails to capture that same magic – and any fan of Twilight that goes to Red Riding Hood hoping for that will be disappointed. Yet despite my words of warning, I know that many will go anyway just hoping for some semblance to Edward, Bella, and Jacob, but you’ll just be wasting your money and time. And finally, if you hated Twilight – you will doubly hate this one!
Why did I let my agent talk me into doing this film?
