Red Riding Hood
Review
by Anthony Morris
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Red Riding Hood
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We all know the fairy tale of Red Riding Hood,
which means we're all thinking the same thing : how do you get an
entire movie out of a story that barely takes five minutes to
tell? Fortunately, it turns out there are a whole lot of ways you can stretch things out. For
starters, you can make the wolf a werewolf, then you can have Red
Riding Hood (aka Valerie) be a young woman (Amanda Seyfried) torn
between the smouldering woodsman Peter (Shiloh Fernandez) and the
blacksmith (Billy Burke) she's been promised to, and then... well,
that's probably enough to get the Twilight fans in for starters. Running alongside and intertwined with the Twilight-style
tortured love / PG-rated barn sex we get professional werewolf hunter
Father Solomon (Gary Oldman), who comes into town with his crack team
of monster-hunters and promptly establishes a reign of low-level terror
as he tears the community apart trying to save it. Not that
there's much of a reason to save this particular medieval village,
populated as it is almost entirely with television-level background
actors who're almost distractingly wooden as they parade around as
potential suspects for wolfing out. To make matters worse,
it seems that it's currently "the blood moon", which is the only time
in a thirteen year period that you'll turn into a werewolf if one bites
you - and it turns out that the current werewolf has his sights set on
Little Red Riding Hood... This is sloppy work all the way
through that lacks even the suspense of the original fairy tale (by the
time the werewolf's identity is revealed, it's difficult to care), and
while there aren't that many glaringly bad moments, nothing here is
ever all that good either. Oldman is kind of fun as a
one-man Spanish Inquisition but everyone else is completely forgettable
- even Seyfried is mostly stuck bunging on a wide-eyed expression -
making the whole love triangle angle only likely to sweep you to a
growing realisation that pretty much anything would be more enthralling
than this. Even Twilight fans should avoid this watered-down gruel. 2 out
of 5
Red Riding Hood
Australian release: 24th March,
2011
Official
Site: Red Riding Hood
Cast: Amanda Seyfried, Shiloh Fernandez, Max Irons, Gary Oldman, Julie
Christie
Director: Catherine Hardwicke
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