A Red Riding Hood Movie Review
A Red Riding Hood Movie Review
A Red Riding Hood Movie Review
Director Catherine Hardwicke has a solid grasp of making beautiful teenagers in love even more beautiful, finding just the ideal light, using slow motion, glamour shots and stunning locations. Her "Twilight" was a huge blockbuster, owing, in part, to the established success of the quartet of novels in the "Twilight" saga written by Stefanie Meyer. The anticipation for the first movie adaptation, which starred Kristen Stewart as Bella and British actor Robert Pattinson as Edward, was fairly high, but certainly not as much as the original's subsequent sequels.
Hardwicke may have been publicly fired (by not being asked back to direct the "Twilight" follow-ups, "New Moon," and "Eclipse," and the forthcoming final film, the two-part "Breaking Dawn"), but her impact on the hugely successful series of a awkward teenaged girl who falls in love with a gorgeous vampire, who is forever 17, is evident.
In fact, it may be argued Hardwicke offered viewers and fans the most visually impactful "Twilight" film. Clearly, her effective choice of camera angles, and -- perhaps, most importantly, portent music -- created an evocative, and genuinely enthralling film. Audiences even the most cynical could believe (whether or not the actors' were as romantically involved off-screen) that these characters were charismatically drawn to each other.
In her latest movie, Hardwicke, try as she can, cannot effectively convince an audience of pretty much anything offered up in "Red Riding Hood." The film opens with a sweeping shot of a beautiful forest (one identical to that in "Twilight"), and settles on what appears to be an isolated, medieval village. Hardwicke offers up, again, as she did in her watershed supernatural romance, an immediate sense of fate, that this boy and this girl (who start out pre-pubescent) are "meant to be together."
Unfortunately, the film never gains any momentum not of suspense, not of credibility, not even of the center-of-the-film romance. Without a doubt, there's an ethereal beauty to the romantic triangle (call it this film's version of Edward-Bella-Jacob). The actors --Amanda Seyfried as Valerie (aka "Red"), Shiloh Fernandez as Valerie's childhood sweetheart Peter, a huntsman(like Valerie's father), and Max Irons (son of U.K. acting legends Jeremy Irons and Sinead Cusack) as the more socially acceptable blacksmith, Henry are gorgeous to look at.
But like "A Knight's Tale" before it (and really even much less successfully than the 2001 Heath Ledger film), the modern and medieval do not and cannot mesh, as presented here. Everyone speaks in a flat, mid-Atlantic (American) accent, which is simply too out of place, for what is clearly supposed to be a village in the Middle Ages. It might not have turned it into a good film, but if everyone on screen could've spoken with passable variations of U.K. accents, it would have only improved it.
Hardwicke puts too much attention to an unintentional forcing of passion (not just in the romance, either, but in occupation and situation) than to tweaking critical elements: the story, the dialogue, and with the exception of Julie Christie (as the Grandmother) and Irons, the acting. Truly, there is a palatable shift in tone when Christie or Irons is on screen it becomes the only time when a viewer is drawn into the story.
Yes, Fernandez can "sizzle," but he's really given a one-dimensional character, and an ultimately thankless role, that whatever acting chops he may actually possess are not evident here. (Although fans of "United States of Tara" know that he actually has some). Speaking of thankless roles, poor Lukas Haas has the tedious whiny role of the village's dimwitted "priest."
But the film's most glaring annoyance, is the frightening, heinous overacting and all-around scene chewing of Gary Oldman as supposed werewolf fighter, Solomon. Oldman (with the exception of very minor character, his assistant) does don an accent, and an inexplicable and distractingly annoying one at that.
There is, expectedly, another "Twilight" connection. "Bella Swan's" dad is also Valerie's dad: actor Billy Burke is the heavy drinking Cesaire, who's married to the weak-willed, but pretty, Suzette (Virginia Madsen).
Given the movie-going audience's preoccupation with the supernatural (all you have to do to prove this is visit the "Teen" section at your local bookstore), and certainly the film success of "Twilight," there is room for a contemporary adaptation of "Red Riding Hood." In fact, the film's trailer presents the film in a way that could bring in an audience which hasn't read any reviews or talked to friends who've seen it. But the film just sadly cannot past muster, even by someone with low expectations and a love of any kind of romance.
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