{"id":1163,"date":"2011-03-11T05:06:12","date_gmt":"2011-03-11T12:06:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/?p=1163"},"modified":"2011-03-11T05:06:12","modified_gmt":"2011-03-11T12:06:12","slug":"review-red-riding-hood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/?p=1163","title":{"rendered":"Review: RED RIDING HOOD"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\u201cRed Riding Hood\u201d is another failed attempt to \u201cTwilight\u201d a fairy tale. Neither a horror film nor an effective teen-skewing romantic fable, \u201cRed Riding Hood\u201d fails to find the teen lit niche it seeks.<\/p>\n

This telling of the Little Red Riding Hood story has Amanda Seyfried playing the girl in red. In \u201cHood,\u201d a small village is terrorized by a werewolf. When a young girl is killed, the men from the town set out to kill the beast. And when they think they\u2019ve accomplished that task, they\u2019re visited by an infamous werewolf slayer (played by Gary Oldman), who proves to be more terrifying than the beast itself. The slayer tells the townspeople that they are not safe and the wolf lives among them. A mystery evolves with a lot of melodramatic finger pointing.<\/p>\n

\u201cRed Riding Hood\u201d suffers from the same problems that marked last week\u2019s \u201cBeastly.\u201d The plot is intriguing but the dialogue and acting are not up to the challenge. While starlet Seyfried comes off best, the collection of talent around her can\u2019t transcend the poor writing. Gary Oldman gets the worst of it adopting an odd accent that seems to float as he chews through his scenes. The character Oldman plays has great potential but this is a movie about teens in peril, which puts the emphasis on the youngsters. <\/p>\n

The mystery in the film concerning the identity of the wolf could have been handled better. What\u2019s missing is a detective. Sure, the slayer is menacing and uses harsh interrogation tactics, but what \u201cRed Riding Hood\u201d needs is Johnny Depp\u2019s Ichabod Crane character from \u201cSleepy Hollow.\u201d Had there been a geeky detective collecting clues leading him (or her) to the wolf, we may have forgiven the poor acting and awful dialogue. But instead the viewer never invests intellectually in the mystery. There\u2019s just no fascination value here. Sadly, the love story never connects on an emotional level either. And as \u201cRed Riding Hood\u201d likely fails at the box office, Seyfried\u2019s run as a teen queen may be nearing the end.<\/p>\n

There is no mistake that \u201cRed Riding Hood\u201d is directed by Catherine Hardwicke, who also helmed the first \u201cTwilight\u201d film. While the direction is adequate, the main problem is that instead of making maximum use of the older cast members that includes an Oscar winner (Julie Christie), the producers think the money is in the teen demographic. And that might be right, but with the exception of Seyfried, this collection of young actors can\u2019t make the material work. The moral of the story is that if you\u2019re going to make a literate romantic movie about teens in danger, you can\u2019t just dress bad material up with old pros. <\/p>\n

The model that \u201cRed Riding Hood\u201d should have followed is the Harry Potter franchise, which assembled excellent actors from top to bottom. \u201cHood\u2019s\u201d producers obviously believe that good looks can overcome poor acting skills and sub par writing. But much like \u201cBeastly,\u201d \u201cRed Riding Hood\u201d proves that a pleasing appearance is sometimes just skin deep. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No Twilight in Medieval Fable<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1164,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","has-thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1163"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1166,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1163\/revisions\/1166"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}