Rating: ***
Red Riding Hood is a mess. It’s got purposefully stilted-acting, incidents of sheer lunacy, harlequin-style romance, scary scenes that are not particularly scary and gory scenes that are not particularly gory. But having said all that there’s some kind of magic at work here by director Catherine Hardwicke.
The (kinda) modern retelling of the classic fairytale “Little Red Riding Hood” starts with a theme used popularly in Hardwicke’s last supernatural outing Twilight: an innocent girl torn between two lovers. The titular heroine is Valerie played by Amanda Seyfried, who with her big Disney princess eyes looks like she just walked out of a fairytale herself. Valerie’s in love with Peter (Shiloh Fernandez), a woodcutter that’s after her own tomboyish heart, but Valerie is betrothed to Henry (Max Irons), son of a prosperous blacksmith who’s no where near as dark and dashing as Peter.
But in this village – “So small barely anyone remembers the name,” Valerie informs us – there’s more to the local colour than who the prettiest girl in the land is going to marry. Nope, this town is haunted by a werewolf, whom the villagers have been satiating for two generations with an animal sacrifice every full moon. Ritual goes off the rails though when Valerie’s sister is found dead, killed by the wolf. With that it’s pitchforks and torches time as the men folk head off into the mountains for hunting season.
The fun doesn’t really get started until Father Solomon rolls into town. Played by Gary Oldman as a combination of Dr VanHelsing, Father Merrick and Col. Kurtz, Solomon arrives with an entourage of werewolf hunters and a giant copper elephant teapot torture device to help flush out the offending wolf. What are his credentials? “I killed wife!” he yells at anyone that doubts his resolve. She was also a werewolf.
Not that this is a simple monster/monster hunting story. Nope, there’s plenty of other intrigue as well like which one of the numerous villagers are suspect of being the werewolf, and why exactly Valerie is able to commune with the wolf when no one else can? It asks her to run away with him… like Peter. One the other hand, she glimpses its human eyes and sees they’re brown… like Henry’s. And what exactly is grandmother (Julie Christie) always doing skulking about?
For a sleepy little village plagued by a monster, this hamlet seems more like Melrose Place during Sweeps. But at least it’s beautifully realized. The film’s design is superb, with nary a flake of fake snow out of place in the beautifully created village by Tom Sanders. It reminded me very much of Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow where there’s a very naturalistic yet artificially creepiness to the setting, which you can do when you build a medieval village to your specifications on a soundstage. Even with that there are several loving establishing shots of the mountain wilderness of British Columbia, where the movie was shot.
The technical specs of the film are amazing, I would expect nothing less, but that’s not a reason to see Red Riding Hood. Amanda Seyfried is pretty to look at, as are the two strapping lads that play her consorts, but really what kind of Hollywood movie would this be without pretty young things in the middle of the action? And for those of you expecting sparks in the vein of another Seyfried vehicle, Atom Egoyan’s Chloe, holster your guns, because aside from a brief instance of PG-13 rated “sensuality,” Red Riding Hood is pretty chaste.
The best part of the film for me was watching a talented group of actors each acting like they’re in an entirely different movie. Seyfried sometimes seems like she’s trying out for innocent bystander number two, Christie seems like she’s playing the Cheshire Cat, or even the proverbial cat that caught canary at that, and even creepy Gary Oldman would be creeped out by the level of creepiness Father Solomon is capable of exuding.
Meanwhile, even actors in smaller parts get a chance to shine. Christine Willes plays Henry’s grandmother and has a Joan Crawford “no wire hangers” vibe when she tells her perspective future granddaughter-in-law that she’s the prettiest of all. And Michel Hogan (Battlestar Galactica) proves again that whether he’s talking about frakking toasters or carrying around a wolf head on a stick, nobody does gristle better than he does.
Despite all that though, the improbable combination of acting styles, the immaculate décor of the set design and the conventions of 700-year-old legend known to everyone, there’s something quite entertaining about Red Riding Hood. It’s not a perfect film and its intentions are not exactly clear, but it’s a breeze to get through. Although not to Grim Brother specs, this fairytale provides a good time at the movies, whether you end up loving it or hating in the end. I have a feeling that there will be plenty of either.
