Red Riding Hood ended up in my queue because I am a sucker for supernatural stories, and a female protagonist is always a surefire way to seal the deal. Updating the folk tale to something palatable for postmodern audiences seems easy especially since so many people paved the way by mashing up the fairy tale with werewolf stories such as Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves. Combined with Buffy theVampire Slayer and a ton of films, including some starring Amanda Seyfried, in which girls/women’s power gets explored through the lens of being monstrous then reclaimed as empowering, this film did not have to be bad, but it was.
Red Riding Hood is one of those dreadful movies that takes place in some amorphous past and place that is less anachronistic in a delightful Xena: The Warrior Princess way and more ahistorical in the way that a filmmaker wants to vaguely have characters wear costumes and have predicaments that would only occur in the past, but not actually have any historical experts do any research that they would then have to adhere to. It takes place in a forest village where the villagers have a pact with the wolf. They give him the best of their animals, and the wolf will not kill any people. When the pact is broken, the villagers decide to take action and call for help with unsurprisingly disastrous results, none more serious than the time lost watching this movie.
When I put Red Riding Hood in my queue, I swear that I never looked at the cast and crew, but as I was watching the film, I kept thinking that the movie vaguely reminded me of Twilight, but worse, which ouch, right? There is a love triangle, and one of the dudes has the same dreadful blockhead look of Edward Cullen, whom for the record I do not find attractive. Billy Burke plays the protagonist’s dad. Catherine Hardwicke, who directed the first cinematic installment of Twilight, directed it! Oh no! I remember when Hardwicke was full of independent film credibility and potential with films like Thirteen (not a fan and barely remember), Lords of Dogtown (excellent) and The Nativity Story (yessssss), but it feels as if everything went downhill after Twilight starting with this movie with the exception of Plush, which was not good, but I enjoyed. Was everything that came before a fluke, and she was always bad, OR did she gradually go downhill until she could no longer tell what was good or bad? Hardwicke is still doing better than me, but still, if you want to know what scares me, it is staying at the party long after the music stopped playing. Hardwicke cannot take all of the blame for the movie because the story was awful.
How bad is Red Riding Hood? She ends up a single mother separated but waiting for her wolf lover, and that ending is supposed to be happy. Yes, I just spoiled an insignificant part of the movie for you without warning. I saved you. You could still watch the entire movie, and I actually did not give away the majority of the plot. I just want you to understand what a colossal let down this film is. I kept waiting for the protagonist to level up and do something cool, but instead I get that final scene—nothing. It is supposed to be a happy ending but she claims the life that she wanted in the best way that she knew how under the circumstances without falling into the roles that others laid out for her: a wife, evil, etc, but it is still a lame denouement. There is all this teasing in the film that she is speedy, a killer, supernaturally connected, but in the end, she is just pretty and only slightly cleverer than the average person in the village. It is so anticlimactic. Does Seyfried’s contract have a vaguely lesbian sexual clause? Because she dances seductively with one of her friends to make a guy jealous. I have no idea if Seyfried deserves the Jessica Alba Award for Professionalism in the Face of Demeaning on the Job Sexual Harassment, but if she won, I would not ask for a recount.
Fun fact: Seyfried apparently did not like the actor who played her love interest, Shiloh Fernandez, and girl, that makes two of us. The only competition that Fernandez and Max Irons, who plays her betrothed, were winning was who could be less memorable to watch. Do not let his pedigree fool you, you may remember Irons as the worst part of a solid movie, The Wife. If these dudes can act, they are hiding their light under a bushel. Maybe it is not their fault. We should look into whether or not it is a hate crime to make guys wear their hair like that.
Red Riding Hood’s generational story was potentially more interesting than the story that we were actually given, but it is treated like an afterthought or a framework excuse to heap the rest of the story’s bullshit on to. Still the best performance in an awful movie goes to Julie Christie, who plays the grandmother and was actually acting as if her character meant something. She clearly did not get the memo that this gig was a job to pay the bills. Runner up would go to Kacey Rohl, whom I will always recognize and never trust from her appearance on Hannibal, who was successfully typecast as one of the titular character’s frenemies. She is the most chilling, scary part of the film and also did not get the memo so maybe she brunches with Christie. Virginia Madsen was looking good, but underutilized. Battlestar Galactica’s Michael Hogan appeared on set, and they gave him a job, which he spent a hot ten minutes doing the role as a favor to someone on set.
After a third of Red Riding Hood, the writer’s conscience seemed to strike and thought, “Huh, I should really make this deeper than some horror romance teen movie,” an abomination genre, then injected this uneven, vaguely xenophobic, misogynistic, evil Christian figure to use as the corrupt power occupying force that sows division among the villagers. Initially the movie introduces the character sympathetically and heroically then reverses course into making him more of a villain than the wolf until finally the storyline is abruptly abandoned. It is as if the writer kept changing his mind about how that character should be, but never reread the script so a viewer is left puzzled because it is all over the map and not because of texture or nuance, just hasty, careless writing, or actor availability. You do not have to randomly throw people of color into a story if you do not want to. I was not expecting to see any people of color anyway. At least we know that Gary Oldman looks good in purple.
Work is supposed to be dignified and intrinsically good so no one should feel ashamed if they have a job, but Red Riding Hood really challenges that concept. It is not even fun bad. It is bafflingly bad. I really hope that no one thought that this movie was good then surprised when it got panned and performed badly in the box office because then that person would be delusional. Do not see it!