Red Riding Hood

I let my friends talk me into seeing this film with them because I think Amanda Seyfried is adorable and I had high hopes that this supposedly adult re-imagining of a children's folk tale would be entertaining in the same aspect of Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow...how disappointed I was.

The acting was so corny and so ridiculous although I can't help but feel that it's not entirely the fault of the actors, but the director. The dialogue was so incredibly cheesy that at several points throughout the movie, groans were heard throughout the audience. Visually, the film is beautiful but the plot is choppy, the romance scenes are cringe worthy, everything about this film was just painful. Shiloh whatever his name is has a constant sneer/smirk on his face that makes his character so annoying. And the other love interest was just plain dull. Seyfried is a perfect Red Riding Hood but she brings nothing to the film other than her constantly doe eyed, surprised expression.

Do not waste your money on this crap.

The plot of Catherine Hardwicke's "Red Riding Hood" revolves around a series of massacres and a pressing question. The said massacres being caused by a werewolf and the said question being who the wolf is. But as I watched it, the question that kept on running through my mind was not who the wolf was, but rather who cares who the wolf was? This is a very flabby-footed, self-delusional mess of a movie that succeeds in making even the great Gary Oldman look as unnatural in his performance as Steven Seagal.

"Red Riding Hood" suffers from a poorly-constructed screenplay, one that seems was written within a handful of days and not given a single second of revision. The writer, David Johnson, was a production assistant on Frank Darabont's masterpiece "The Shawshank Redemption" but his talents seem to be more focused on polishing up a movie rather than spinning up a story. The plot of "Red Riding Hood" is contrived, flat, and lacking any zest. In fact, even though the denouement has great potential to be a real shocker and (I'll be honest) caught me by surprise, it was handled and executed so sloppily and the writing that summarizes it all up was so flimsy and manipulative, that it registered no impact on me whatsoever.

There are no characters worth caring about and next to nothing in terms of acting. The titular character is played by an up-and-coming starlet by the name of Amanda Seyfried, although if all of her performances are as uncharismatic and dull as this one, I cannot imagine why. In this performance, at least, she did not strike me as being a natural actress. Then again, she has nothing to work with in Mr. Johnson's screenplay. She also has two romantic interests, one played by Max Irons and the other by a wooden-faced Shiloh Fernandez. They are just as boring as their characters. They have absolutely no chemistry whatsoever with Miss Seyfried; I never felt any passion. Even Gary Oldman, so good so many times before, is awful here, hamming up and chewing apart every scene that he is in. His introductory moment, where he explains his experiences with werewolves, is handled by him in a way that is so over-the-top, almost like a really bad vaudeville performance. It's hard to believe that this is the same actor from "The Dark Knight," "The Book of Eli," and the Harry Potter movies.

If there is one good performance at all it is by Julie Christie, who is just as magnetic and wonderful as she was when she graced the screen in David Lean's "Doctor Zhivago" forty-six years ago. She has a powerful star presence and quality that allows her to overcome even the trashy dialogue and nothingness that she was supplied.

Another strike against the movie is the apparent lack of experience by its director, Catherine Hardwicke. She was a production designer before this movie (she designed the wonderful town reconstruction for "Tombstone" in 1993) but her skills with a motion picture camera are next to nothing. She doesn't seem to even know the basics about misc en scene and how to structure a sequence. Not even enough to know that a moment where Mr. Oldman gives a last minute warning to a stubborn old villager about the impending threat of the werewolf that she should have had a reverse angle to show the villager's reaction; instead she chooses to stick to the back of his head. There is no steady flow of images here, with too many medium and long shots and close-ups so claustrophobic that they enter the territory of being loony. One scene that was directed particularly badly was a laughable love moment between Miss Seyfriend and Mr. Fernandez. There is a problem with a romantic moment where the sight of two people making love is neither heart-warming, nor, obviously, erotic.

But Miss Hardwicke did coordinate well with her production designer, for the sets are quite good. And the special effects are decent enough in and of themselves. The werewolf, computer-generated of course, are much better than the cartoony wolves I saw in "Season of the Witch" earlier this year. It's only a shame that that wolf was not on-screen more.

"Red Riding Hood" has a feel of so many medieval melodramas of recent years: half-hearted and flimsy. It is also crippled by that haunting feeling that even the people who made the movie would not even want to see it. It feels like an assignment done by people hopelessly unhappy in their work, who just wanted to get through the dailies so they could go home and relax before getting up to do the same thing again the next day.

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.

I wasn't sure whether I wanted to see this movie. I am not a fan of the Twilight movies(the first of which Catherine Hardwicke also directed) and it didn't look like my kind of film. But I saw it for the wonderful Gary Oldman.

I wasn't expecting much, and I didn't get much. Red Riding Hood(not the fairytale by the way) does try hard to be a lot of things, including introducing a number of horror, fantasy and mystery elements. But due to the sluggish pace and disjointed story structure(that is full of overlong filler, particularly the celebration scene, and the dream sequence was very awkwardly placed) the film fails at pretty much all these elements.

The script is very clunky, underdeveloped and banal as well. A lot of it did not keep my attention and I found myself chuckling into my coke at any unintentionally funny bits. The CGI is quite poor here, with the wolf looking as though it was done in a hurry. Hardwicke's direction never rises above mediocre, the editing is unfocused and frenzied and the three titular characters are incredibly dull and uninteresting with the romantic elements between them poorly written and directed.

The acting doesn't fare much better. Amanda Seyfried is pretty but bland in the title role and shows little or no chemistry with her co-stars, while Max Irons(son of Jeremy), Lukas Haas and Shiloh Fernandez show good looks but awkward line delivery. Virginia Madsen and Billy Burke are both wasted, both over-doing it in a valiant attempt to elevate their weak material(these two actors probably had the worst of the dialogue next to the leads actually). And the climax is little more than a mangled mess and devoid of depth.

Despite these many cons, there are some decent assets. The score is atmospheric enough and the costume and set design are spot on. Plus there are two good performances, Gary Oldman and Julie Christie. Oldman does chew the scenery, but he looks as though he's having a ball, while Christie is very enchanting.

Overall, not terrible, but deeply flawed and over-ambitious. 4/10 Bethany Cox

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.