Red Riding Hood Review: Like, What Big Teeth You Have and Stuff

In Catherine Hardwicke’s medieval fantasy world, dudes’ faces are perfectly chiseled and shorn like a baby’s ass, below perfectly coiffed bed-head; chicks are cherubic, voluptuous, and pure but are nothing if not desperately wanting of a Broheim-ish man. Hardwicke visualizes a period world where people talk in contemporary slang and don’t sweat even when their lives are in jeopardy. That is to say, the woman has zero vision. Red Riding Hood is the newest public evacuation from the lower intestine of a director who is on such an artistic and creative fail-roll, you would think she’s been stealing fleeting glances from Brett Ratner’s playbook.

The world of Red Riding Hood is of indistinguishable time and place. There is a village peppered with cottages built of wood and straw. Villagers wear tunics and frocks. Farmers farm, hunters hunt, woodsmen…wood? The most cut and broody of the village’s axemen is Peter (Shiloh Fernandez), who has been the apple of young Valerie’s (Amanda Seyfried) eye since they were kids deciding whether or not to slit the throats of captive rabbits (hey, medieval villaging is a hard-knock life).  There is lustful passion between the two, the likes of which no one has seen since Twilight. As much as Valerie wants Peter, she is betrothed to Henry (Max Irons), another monosyllabic-speaking, angled cheek-boned angel. So, let’s do a gut-check: Broody, mysterious setting. Check. A female lead torn between two scrumptious men. Check. This is beginning to sound familiar. None of this matters much, however, because the small village is plagued by a massive wolf that stalks its prey on nights where there is a full moon. So who they gonna call? Gaining an assist in the form of Gary Oldman’s Father Solomon, he and his entourage enter the village with British-looking knights and a giant steel elephant (seriously) for purposes unknown. Conveniently, the Trojan beast becomes the literal white elephant in the room when it comes to the focus of the film’s world; between a Braveheart-ish village, medieval European knights, a Roman Catholic priest, and a Far East-inspired elephant, Hardwicke illustrates her lack of vision by grasping at straws creatively and having no connective tissue between all of these disparate elements.

The village hunters dismiss Solomon’s presence, since they are convinced they have killed what they believe to be the wolf. Solomon believes they have killed a wolf, but not the wolf, specifically since the head on the celebratory pike is an actual wolf head and not that of Taylor Lautner. Solomon loses his argument and the village throws a party that evening in celebration of the kill, replete with dancing, music, and mead. As everyone makes with the merry, Henry finds Valerie and whisks her away to a nearby stable to no doubt stick his needle in her haystack. Though before he can, the celebration is surprise attacked by the real wolf. Panic sets in, and so does a confusingly shot action sequence. The wolf finds Valerie and speaks to her through inner-monologue, revealing that the creature is human after all, but she keeps this information mostly to herself, only telling her best friend.  Solomon deduces that the wolf is actually a werewolf and is most certainly one of the villagers, at which point the film clumsily switches gears to a Crucible-esque shakedown of the village folk. The sequence is rife with hilariously melodramatic slow-motion close-ups of eyes as Valerie tries desperately to deduce who is the beast and who are simply background extras by gazing into those luscious soul-windows.

Valerie’s best friend turns on her after Solomon fingers her brother as the werewolf, forcing her to reveal that Valerie can converse with the creature and, thus, is a witch. Solomon makes a trade for Valerie and sentences her to be bait for the werewolf, which for some reason requires Valerie to wear an iron mask molded in the shape of a pig’s head. It’s anybody’s guess as to what the logic is in putting a cast-iron pig helmet on Valerie, but this becomes yet another example of the film’s shortsightedness. Realizing the imminent fate of Valerie, Edward and Jacob, er, Peter and Henry put aside their differences to save the girl they both love. Once free, Victoria escapes with her men and the werewolf attacks again in another visually convoluted set piece. The aftermath of the battle sets the stage for the final moments of the film which includes what has to be the most arbitrary and hilariously out-of-context sex scene in recent memory. To say that it is shoehorned in at the last minute is an epic understatement to be sure.

So who is the werewolf? This is the arbitrary question that screenwriter David Johnson forces us to consider for the back end of the movie the same way in which he crammed an impossibly contrived plot twist into his previous effort, Orphan. The mystery wants to be Scream, but is ultimately inconsequential as red herring after red herring beats you about the face. There comes a point where you just stop caring, if you even cared at all. The suspense of the film is bland and dull, providing no sense of urgency even when things are at their most dire. This is due in part to the neutered nature of the film’s violence, which is basically non-existent. Warner Brothers clearly wants to keep this a PG-13 affair, but they stack most of that content on faux sensuality and sex when the film would have done better with some good old fashioned stage blood. As it is, all of the wolf kills happen off-screen, which contributes largely to the confusing edits of the action sequences. The cast is unabashedly sleepwalking through the entirety of the film, but a special shout-out goes out to Shiloh Fernandez who is so inconceivably awful, so stagnant and one-dimensional, that it is simply mind-blowing that the role of Twilight’s Edward came down to R-Patts and him (his casting in Red Riding Hood was Hardwicke’s mea culpa for passing on him for Twilight ).

Amidst all of this insanity, there is also a crazy grandmother, silver fingernails, bloody stew, and a literal village idiot that all somehow fit into the framework of this, one of the most inert, stupid films to come down the pipe in a good long while. It is a truly awful blend of Twilight and The Village, if you can even fathom such a brew existing. With Twilight, director Catherine Hardwicke was given the freedom to write her own checks in Hollywood and has somehow fooled the business into thinking that she is a capable filmmaker. While in her Red Riding Hood, we’re asked to solve the mystery of “who’s the big, bad wolf?” we should really be asking ourselves, “who’s the dopey, delusional filmmaker?”