Hoodwinked

Review by Clint Morris

Like a relatively good sitcom (think Friends or How I met your Mother – not something you’d rather wax the inside of the toilet bowl, than watch), Hoodwinked is both fresh and funny, but just like something you’d watch on TV, it starts to wear out it’s welcome around the twenty-minute mark.

Unfortunately for us, and unlike a sitcom, Hoodwinked still has another hour to go. Suddenly, what starts out as novel and [almost] pants-wetting funny, takes the guise of a drunken uncle at Christmas – the longer he goes on, the less funny and welcome he is.

A kiddie spoof on the famous fairytales – especially Little Red Riding Hood – it fixes on feisty Red Riding Hood (voiced by Anne Hathaway) and pals, including Granny (voiced by Glenn Close), The Big Bad Wolf (voiced by Patrick Warburton) and the woodsman (voiced by James Belushi), being questioned by the police over possible ties to a recipe-stealing scam.

With such family gems as Shrek and whatever Disney is doing any given week, Hoodwinked really had its work cut out for it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t even try to compete with the big boys, quite content to merely mingle with the afternoon kids TV brigade – not just in its style of feeble storytelling, but it’s voice cast, which doesn’t feature even a singular A-lister, which is unfortunate, because sometimes the big name voice cast is a large part of a family film’s appeal.

There’s a couple of good laughs to be had, but you can easily get away with simply walking in and out of the room, catching the odd fleeting scene, when your kids hire it out on DVD.

2 out of 5

Hoodwinked
Australian release: 3rd August, 2006
Cast: Anne Hathaway, Glenn Close, James Belushi, Anthony Anderson, Patrick Warburton
Director: Tony Leech, Todd Edwards, Cory Edwards
Website: Click here.