Red Riding Hood (2011)
Certified: 12
Duration: 100 minutes
Directed by: Catherine Hardwicke
Starring: Amanda Seyfried, Gary Oldman, Billy Burke, Shiloh Fernandez, Max Irons, Virginia Madsen, Lukas Haas, Julie Christie
KRS release

The Gothic version of this fairytale begged to be given Tim Burton’s style of direction in Sleepy Hollow. Instead it got saddled with a Catherine Hardwicke who seems too intent on remaking her own version of Twilight.

The film looks really good in some moments but it never achieves that poetic romance or symbolism that it aspires to. Under all the posing and gazing longingly at the camera of Amanda Seyfried, the film is a simple whodunit that even Scooby Doo himself would manage to solve without Shaggy’s help.

Daggerhorn is a forgotten town, surrounded by a wooden stockade and filled with mediaeval-type houses. The townspeople seem to be weary and tired folk, used to living in both hardship and fear. They know that a werewolf lives among them but they do not know its human form. For years they have been locking their doors and windows tight at night leaving offerings for the beast every full moon.

Everything changes when a teenage girl is found dead. She had just discovered that her mother, Suzette (Virginia Madsen) and her woodcutter father Cesaire (Billy Burke) had just promised her younger and more beautiful sister Valerie (Amanda Seyfried) to be married to Henry (Max Irons). She had secretly fancied Henry for herself. Meanwhile Valerie has a thing going for Peter (Shiloh Fernandez), a poor woodcutter.

Terror and shock spreads through the town with different reactions from the likes of Father Auguste (Lukas Haas), Valerie’s grandma (Julie Christie) and Valerie’s friends. The men go into the wood to kill the werewolf. Although they end up killing a wolf, Henry’s father ends up dead.

Confident that they are free of the curse they are dismayed when werewolf hunter Fr Solomon (Gary Oldman) comes to town saying they have only killed a common grey wolf. He is accompanied by his own mercenaries and a carriage-sized steel elephant. The town decides to celebrate in a festival of excess. Valerie discovers she must decide between Henry, Peter and the werewolf himself with which she seems to share a telepathic bond.

One major disappointment in this film is the werewolf itself. The CGI effects are definitely on the poor side here. Never frightening, the wolf looks more like a mongrel mixed between a poodle and a labrador which has just been given a shower. This creature is super slobbery but never really lives up to being a terror which has held a village hostage for a good 20 years.

Visually the film has its appeal, especially in the form of Amanda Seyfried wearing a bright red cape silhouetted against a white snowy landscape.

Ms Seyfried plays wide-eyed innocent well but, like the part she played in the recent Chloe (2009), she still comes off a bit cold when she has to be erotic and sensual.

Gary Oldman overplays his hand every inch of the way and I liked his hammed up performance. Seeing him torture his prisoners in an elephant-shaped oven as he shouts gleefully “Lock him in the elephant” is delightfully villainous. The rest of the cast is almost nondescript, making one wonder how the likes of Virginia Madsen and Julie Christie could end up being so misplaced in a film.

At one point Ms Hardwicke decides to insert a sort of dance/festival/orgy where everyone dances to modern music very much in the style of the famous dance sequence from the third Matrix film. The villagers put on pigs’ masks and go overboard in this out of place sequence.

The classic lines of “what big eyes, big ears, big mouth” is still in the story but as it stands this Tinseltown version of this classic fairytale is too toothless for its own good.