Red Riding Hood

I'll start this review by saying that Red Riding Hood was made by the director of Twilight, and it shows. That's all that most viewers will need to know, but I wouldn't be much of a blogger if I turned down a chance to over-analyze and rant.

Red Riding Hood has as little to do with the myth that inspired it as Ridley Scott's Robin Hood. Perhaps that's a good thing, since the Grimm's fairy tale didn't exactly have much of a plot, but re-imagining it as a medieval Twilight is hardly an improvement.

Amanda Seyfried plays the same role she's played in every movie since Mean Girls: a pretty body for men to admire and a blank slate for women to project themselves onto. And it's not that she's bad actor. She just seems to pick the blandest roles and play them accordingly. The two male leads do their best Edward Cullen impressions: brooding, threatening (but in a benign, tween-friendly way) and lacking in any personality aside from their poorly repressed sex drives. Speaking of which, I don't remember the last time I saw so much almost sex in a movie. For anyone who isn't drooling over the protagonists, the sexual frustration in this movie is painful to watch. Another obvious carryover from Twilight. You'd think the director of Thirteen would be much more poignant  in these matters.

The supporting cast is mostly forgettable; even Gary Oldman seems boring, and when  have you ever seen a boring performance from him? The werewolf looks like something out of a much campier and much more fun movie. And when it speaks (yes, it speaks) it sounds like something that might have passed for Aslan's stunt double. The only good thing I can say about the cast is that none of them manage to embarrass themselves.

To the movie's credit, the set and costumes are beautiful, and a director with a better eye for cinematography and adventure set-pieces could have made quite a spectacle out of it. Sadly, Hardwicke is as clumsy with anything resembling action as Michael Bay is with anything that isn't action.

That's not to say that Red Riding Hood is a complete disaster. It has a coherent story and tells it with an audience in mind. But when the only compliments I can pay a movie are backhanded, it's obvious that I simply can't recommend it to anyone.

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