Film Review with Robert Mann – Red Riding Hood

17th April 2011

Red Riding Hood *

“From the director of Twilight” (fair warning, the T word is going to get mentioned a lot in this review) – five words that can either make or break your film at the box office and, based on the mediocre performance of Red Riding Hood in the states thus far, is apparently more like to do the latter – or it might just have been that the film sucks. It would appear that if the film doesn’t actually feature Twilight as part of its title the majority of that series’ fans simply don’t want to know – after all, the Twilight films are so successful because of the huge popularity of the books not because of anyone involved with the films themselves – while, even if the film doesn’t feature Twilight as part of its title, any one of the many people who absolutely loathe that franchise will still avoid it like the plague.
Those five words alone and the fact that director Catherine Hardwicke is the woman behind the first Twilight movie – which is the best of the lot in this critic’s opinion – may be the only direct links that Red Riding Hood has to the Twilight films but the young adult dark fantasy style and romantic aspects certainly suggest that Warner Brothers Pictures were very much aiming for a film in the distinct style of Twilight, although this evidently doesn’t actually matter if the film isn’t actually Twilight. With all the furore surrounding Twilight it is very easy to forget that Hardwicke was a director long before she made that film, past efforts such as Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown suggesting a filmmaker capable of doing some truly hard hitting teen filmmaking, even if The Nativity Story seems about as far removed from either of those films as one could possibly get and her earlier films seems to bear little reflection on the work she is doing now. Not that any of this really matters, though, as Red Riding Hood is “from the director of Twilight”, not of any of those other films and everything in the marketing for the film has done little to suggest that her style will deviate much from that that was seen in that film.

On paper at least this “breathtaking vision of a 700 year old legend” – the film being very loosely based on the folk tale Little Red Riding Hood collected by both French author Charles Perrault under the name Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (Little Red Riding Hood) and several decades later by the Brothers Grimm as Rotkäppchen (Little Redcap) – sounds like a film with the potential for great success and the extremely bizarre and completely surprising presence of Leonardo DiCaprio as a producer could certainly be mistaken as an endorsement of the film’s quality but the mediocre box office results to date combined with the abysmal critical reception thus far have betrayed what really isn’t that good a film – I was originally quite hopeful upon seeing the first trailer for the film but after having seen that trailer several times my anticipation really began to drop – even with a perfectly cast Amanda Seyfried, who has been one of the only things in the film to actually get a good response, in the leading role.

And with screenwriter David Leslie Johnson also only having one writing credit preceding him, that being the not especially well received horror thriller Orphan, even the writing is unlikely to change anyone’s opinion of the film. Red Riding Hood may not be the new instalment of the Twilight franchise but with Catherine Hardwicke seemingly bringing the Twilight touch to the film and the story’s legendary wolf becoming a werewolf, it may as well be. So, Red Riding Hood doesn’t manage to escape the shadow of Twilight but does it at least manage to be in any way decent on its own terms? The people of the small village of Daggerhorn have long maintained a truce with the werewolf that stalks their woods. Every month they sacrifice an animal in the hope that the wolf will depart with its thirst for blood quenched. One of Daggerhorn’s inhabitants is Valerie (Amanda Seyfried), a young girl who wears a red cloak given to her as a present by her Grandmother (Julie Christie) and is in love with brooding woodcutter Peter (Shiloh Fernandez), even though her parents Suzette (Virginia Madsen) and Cesaire (Billy Burke) have promised her to Henry (Max Irons), the son of wealthy blacksmith Adrian Lazar (Michael Shanks).

Her plans to run away with Peter are shattered when the wolf kills her older sister Lucie (Alexandria Maillot) and, suddenly, she finds that her entire world has changed. Famed werewolf hunter Father Solomon (Gary Oldman) is sent for, but immediately warns the townsfolk that the wolf could be lurking within any one of them. As tensions rise as it transpires that anyone she knows could be the werewolf, Valerie finds herself at the centre of Solomon’s hunt, and discovers that the wolf may be closer than she ever suspected. Red Riding Hood is a film that, at least on a conceptual level, seemed to show a lot of potential. The classic folk tale it’s based on is timeless and a story that most people are familiar with and the fresh spin provided by having the story’s wolf actually be a werewolf could have opened up a whole world of possibilities for the story of the film. Director Catherine Hardwicke, meanwhile, seemed like a pretty good choice to direct, her experience from Twilight showing her to be quite capable at dark teen fantasy.

Yet, somehow, despite all the potential this film so clearly had, the final product has turned out to be truly abysmal. Sure, on some levels it is quite aesthetically pleasing, the film having a rich and lavish look with good costume and set design, the forest setting – which isn’t entirely dissimilar to the setting of the Twilight films – having a fantastical fairy tale look to it, the surrounding snow covered mountainous landscapes that feature during the opening credits and at several other points during the film being epic and magnificent and the cinematography being truly beautiful at times, with a bright colour scheme – this is a dark fantasy that, for once, doesn’t feature dark visuals – and rich visuals that are vibrant and enchanting, the red of Valerie’s red cloak really popping out, and shots of snow falling that have a magical and enchanting quality to them. But, for all the visual splendour that is on show, the film can’t avoid feeling cheap at times, the werewolf itself being a competent CGI creation but the attack sequences generally being little more than passable, largely failing to be exciting, thrilling or scary. And, more importantly, there is hardly anything going on beneath the surface.

The plot just meanders without clear aim or purpose and the majority of what happens is just plain dull, failing to engage the interest of anyone but the most undemanding of moviegoers – and even then I suspect teen girls going to see in the hopes of it being the next Twilight will be in for massive disappointment. There is no notable dramatic tension or character depth whatsoever and with little in the way of characterisation – the version of Red we see here is just a rebellious teenager type character and virtually every other character is pretty one note – it is hard to care about the characters and even harder to care when one of them is killed. Any one of the villagers could be the werewolf yet it is hard to care who it actually is and, when revealed, the identity of the werewolf, while not being the person directly hinted at, is hardly surprising. The characters aren’t exactly helped by weak dialogue and the weak writing feeds into the performances of the cast. Amanda Seyfried is magnetic in the leading role, doing a lot with her extremely poorly developed character, but she is underserved by the lacklustre writing and an underwhelming supporting cast that sees even the usually excellent Gary Oldman failing to deliver a remarkable performance and that is also a waste of the talents of well respected actresses like Virginia Madsen and Julie Christie and TV science fiction actors Michael Shanks (from Stargate SG-1) and Michael Hogan (from Battlestar Galactica). The film’s problems don’t end there either.

Misjudged scenes of sensuality just feel rather out of place in the period setting and the ending is something of an anti-climax, making the lack of anything of real interest happening for the majority of the film all the more evident. There are a few good touches and the werewolf myth proves a good fit for the Red Riding Hood story but so little is really done with it that the film just screams of wasted potential and the overall result is a surprisingly dull and lifeless effort. I actually liked Hardwicke’s Twilight film so it really means something when I say that this film is truly terrible. It’s hardly scary, it isn’t exciting, it’s barely romantic and it isn’t even fantastical enough so that the hell is it supposed to be? The trailer for Red Riding Hood claimed that it would provide “a breathtaking vision” but the only thing breathtaking about this film is the amount of breath you will use up in the 1 hour 40 minutes of your life wasted sitting through it. A soulless effort then that, if you choose to ignore this review and go see it, you will probably have given up on it before you can say “what big eyes you have”.

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Review by Robert Mann BA (Hons)

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