Le Chaperon rouge

Is this movie corny? Yes. Are there cliches? Of course. Is it also entertaining, sexy, and fun? 100%. I watched this movie in late high school and now in my mid-20s I still love it. It's a dark take on a classic fairy tale and is entertaining all the way through. The twist in the end took me by surprise, but I am someone who hardly ever sees twists coming, so take that with a grain of salt. This movie is worth a watch. It's not a masterpiece but it is enjoyable if you don't expect anything earth shattering from it.

You'd be hard pressed to find a better example of a film ruined by trying to be too many things to too many people than Red Riding Hood, which opens Friday and, by all rights, should close Saturday.

The most obvious audience Hood hopes to attract is fans of the Twilight film series, snagging the director of the first film, Catherine Hardwicke, and refashioning the Little Red Riding Hood folk tale into, in a remarkably halfhearted way, a love triangle between three extraordinarily uninteresting characters. (If all three had been eaten by the wolf in the first act, we might have been onto something.)

What's weird about Hood, which inexplicably counts Leonardo DiCaprio as one of its producers (stick to swimming in icy water, Leo), is that this romantic angle is not its main thrust. It doesn't have a main thrust.

In fact, for a supposedly sexier take on a classic folk tale, it's in desperate need of thrust in general.

It flits around the idea of being a more adult folk tale but never commits. It throws in a bit of (pretty bad) CGI werewolf attack action from time to time, but it's nowhere near violent or bloody enough (it's PG-13) to interest action or horror fans. It has moments of campy fun, specifically every second Gary Oldman appears as a sinister Cardinal Richelieu-type character, but other scenes are played ridiculously straight.

Perhaps the film's biggest mistake — and that's saying something — is structuring itself like a Scream film. The Big Bad Wolf is indeed a werewolf, and our sweet little Red (named Valerie, played by Amanda Seyfried) has to figure out which of her fellow villagers turns into a beast when the moon is full. Is it her forbidden love, the dull as dishwater Peter (Shiloh Fernandez), who presumably equates to the hunter of the folk tale? Or is it the man she's been arranged to marry, the somehow even duller Henry (Max Irons)? Or is it one the other remarkably dull villagers? And given how dull Valerie is, who the hell really cares?

On looks alone, Seyfried perhaps is perfectly cast as Red, considering Christina Ricci might be a bit too old for the role. Seyfried's pristine, alabaster skin and enormous eyes give Red just the right look, but every time she opens her mouth you're begging for that werewolf to put her out of our misery.

To be fair, no actor could be expected to excel given the cheesy dialogue and Hardwicke's uninspired direction; solid veterans such as Virginia Madsen, Julie Christie and Lukas Haas struggle to make an impression, with Christie holding up the best. As Red's father, Billy Burke seems more zoned out than James Franco at the Oscars, suggesting he's only here for one more Twilight connection.

Only Oldman acquits himself well, simply because he treats the film as the campfest it should have been from the opening credits. He's acting in an entirely different movie, a Sam Raimi romp like Army of Darkness or Drag Me to Hell, and Red Riding Hood briefly becomes almost fun during Oldman's most animated scenes.

The film doesn't even look that great in a technical sense: The exteriors look fake, all clearly shot on soundstages, and not fake in an intentional "this is a dreamy heightened reality, because this is a folk tale" way. They look fake in a "we really suck at our jobs" way.

Red Riding Hood is pretending to be a darker, more adult take on the folk tale, but it's hardly the first: Neil Jordan mined the territory in 1984 with the R-rated The Company of Wolves, focusing more on sexual metaphors and heavy werewolf action. It wasn't great, but at least it knew what it wanted to be. Red Riding Hood tries to be a little bit of everything, but ultimately it succeeds only in being a tedious mess.

Has it become increasingly difficult to write an ending? Have writers suddenly forgotten that the climax is the high point of a story? Or is Hollywood getting lazy? Red Riding Hood is probably the most frustrating and unsatisfying movie I've been to, and the above reason is just one of many. While it certainly isn't bad, I haven't finished feeling so let down since Haneke's "The White Ribbon".

Of course, Hardwicke is a director who is willing take big risks. She did so with Twilight, which was a huge smash with teens everywhere. And she does have a good eye for a shot, and several scenes here show. If had to recommend the movie for one thing alone, it would be for the visuals. The look of the film has a gorgeous, lush and colourful palette that made this film worth seeing on the big screen.

The film's biggest problem aside from being anti-climatic is that the plot is just... a mangled mess. It reads like a really bad fanfiction. If you thought Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland was bad... .wait till you get a load of this movie. We have several plot points that come in and suddenly are left do die, one of which includes Father Solomon played by Gary Oldman, who is made to be a crazy bastard type character, and we don't see anything to prove it. To top it all off, it's rife with clichés, like the obligatory love triangle, the whodunit, damned protagonist.

The actors are a mixed bag. Seyfried does a good job here and has plenty of emotion in her performance. She has plenty of cheesy lines but she does a good job for what she has to work with. Gary Oldman was also great, but that was expected as he always shines with every performance. On the downside, Shiloh Fernandez gives one of the worst performances ever here. He spends the whole movie looking like he wants to punch someone and reads his lines like he's reading them off a paper. And Virginia Madsen just awful here as well, and is over-acting Billy Burke In short Red Riding Hood is a film that has plenty of promise, but sadly doesn't live up to it. It isn't a bad film by any means, but you are most likely to leave disappointed.

I went to the cinema today with two good friends to see this film. I had seen the trailer and got worked up that this would be a good film. However, it is not as good as it could have been. Don't get me wrong, I did enjoy some of the film. Amanda Seyfried, Shiloh Fernandez, Max Irons and the excellent Gary Oldman acted brilliantly in the film, and the effects for the Werewolf were pretty fantastic as well. However, the rest of the cast let this film down and although it is classed as a "horror" movie, there is only really one jump-worthy moment. I don't want to give away the secret of the wolf, but if you listen closely, you can easily tell who it is...

There is a bit of gore, but if you are into some of the supernatural stuff (especially Twilight, even though I'm not a fan), you should give it a shot and might like this... but horror-lovers, keep well away, you might end up feeling a bit ripped-off...

Just returned from a nearly sold out theater and I must say the film was somewhere between decent and good!

I've read quite a few reviews here and was truly surprised about the supremely negative feedback. "The Grimm brothers would roll in their graves," someone wrote. My response to that is: "Really, would they now?" I believe a bit of research on the subject would do some quite a bit of good. The brothers Grimm -which weren't the original story tellers of 'Rotkaeppchen' as they called it- told folktales, not fairy tales…they were the very first tabloid writers and although their stories all had a grain of truth at the very core, the brothers wrote them to feed into peoples believes, superstitions and prejudice in central Europe in the 1800…their tales were often capricious and usually cruel, showing very little moral. It took generations of translations and retelling to soften the originals enough to be considered bedtime stories because the originals would have provoked nightmares in grown man at their time. Does anyone know what the significance is of the name Peter and why he wears black throughout the entire film?? I'd love to read your ideas about that. The film is a nice translation…yet another one. And by far closer based on the Grimm brothers vision than the stories we all were told as kids. I did see a bit of parallel to Twilight but only because both, this film and all the Twilight movies were filmed in Vancouver and surely used the same scenery. The Storyline is based on the folktale and (in my opinion) it has been done rather well.