Red Riding Hood (2011)

This movie is baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad. I mean, really bad. Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, I have personally renamed ‘ADD: The Movie’. I completely mean that as a complement to the kinetic nature of the film. Here, we have ‘Cliché: The Movie’. Because the film is just one big cliché. It is really bad. I don’t like this film. The movie’s main fault doesn’t come from the effects, the atmosphere, or even the actors. Gary Oldman is a brilliant actor, and even here he has been reduced to a stick of wood. And on that logic, I don’t blame the actors. I blame their agents, but I don’t blame the actors. The problem with Red Riding Hood is it’s extremely bland script and Lifetime-quality direction by Katherine Hardwick, who directed…Twilight. Hardwick directs with such an ineptness that it sickens me. And the script…wow, the script. I’m currently watching The Rite on my computer, and I don’t want to look up the screenwriter, because it’s just not worth it. Their basic idea had a lot of promise. I am a huge fan of films that spin classic stories, especially fairy tales. When you have the story of Red Riding Hood mixed with Rashomon, you get Hoodwinked, a movie that I care for very much. So I even know that Red Riding Hood can be done well. The film basically does chronicle the Red Riding Hood story. Amanda Seyfried plays Valerie, a girl whose village is under attack by a werewolf. She wants to marry a man, but she has been promised to another. All of this is happening while the wolf is attacking. And in order to stop the wolf, the village hires a man named Solomon (Gary Oldman) whose methods of killing the wolf are…less than orthodox, to say the least. This man really has no conscious. He is crazy. But, things happen, and the wolf is still at large. The film trudges along at this pace, which is pretty slowly, for a good bit of the film. It’s not that the film is so bad it makes me angry, it just makes me sleepy. The film is slow, and clichéd. And then the film gets to the final twenty minutes, and this is where I got mad, The film begins to stick true to the story a bit more, begins to get more exciting, and is a good bit more fun. And then, it stops being good. It’s just a run-of-the-mill fight scene after that. So I was having fun for about two minutes in a movie that is 100 minutes long. So on that ratio, the movie is…bad.
1/10