 These vampire/werewolf movies have the same format: A bunch of young, good looking people with chiseled jaws and perfect hair, a cheesy love triangle and a huge heap of over-acting. Why the Twilight series got away with it? Because they’ve forced us to tolerate them (when someone comes out with three movies, with a fourth one in the pipeline, you know they’re persistent and won’t give up).
But a movie like Red Riding Hood doesn’t stand a chance. It’s a hormonal/testosterone charged drama, which was initially a children’s fantasy story, but has been turned into an unconvincing and unappealing portrayal of sex and death instead. That’s why they took the ‘little’ out of the original title, cause the story revolves around a girl who isn’t little from any angle.
Instead, it’s about a girl named Valerie, who is incredibly beautiful, is in love with her childhood friend, Peter, who is equally good looking but poor, but her hand has been given in marriage to Henry, who is also conveniently just as hot as the other two but rich. The story is set in medieval times, in some European forest, and the village lives in fear of the wolf, who has been killing families for years.
So the wolf hasn’t attacked the village for a while, and the movie starts with his first attack after a few years. The fatal attack has been on Valerie’s sister. While she has been making plans to run away with Peter (played by Shiloh Fernandez) her sister’s death brings everything to a halt.
The village then decides to find the beast and kill it, and when they are unsuccessful, Father Solomon (played by Gary Oldman) shows up to the village. He is a priest, and has a personal grudge against the wolf (as he lost his wife to it) and is intent on destroying him.
 Now amongst all this drama happening in the village, there is the complexity of these 3 individuals, who are more concerned about their own love stories and about who gets the girl in the end. Henry, (played by Max Irons) is Valerie’s fiance, thus busy having a battle of the egos with Peter. Valerie is busy trying to make the decision of whether to run away with Peter, or respect her parent’s decision.
Moving away from their high-school, 90210 inspired drama, the village is going crazy because the priest announces that the werewolf conveniently transforms into a human and lives among the villagers. So yes, that’s about it. The rest of the movie is spent on making everyone look suspicious so that you have no idea who the killer could be.
There is the creepy grandmother, Valerie’s mother and her secrets, Henry and his desire to have Valerie, Peter’s shady expressions which make us doubt him, the priest himself, and Henry’s mother who keeps giving everyone creepy looks. That is the only reason one can get through the entire movie without shutting it off halfway. You will be on the edge of your seat trying to guess who the killer is, and while it’s been executed in the most ridiculous way, that’s probably the only fun part too.
What is irritating is the amount of overacting done by everyone. It’s like everyone is shocked or scared every single second, having jaw dropping moments, gasping every time the wind blows or a branch falls. It was like watching an Indian star-plus worthy soap opera.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, the movie has been shot in the best way possible, but the cinematographer couldn’t save the poorly written mish mash of so many themes in to one film. The movie has been written so poorly, that they even tried to include the infamous dialogue ‘My, what big teeth you have Grandma,” even though it didn’t even fit in the situation from any angle.
The movie has been badly written and poorly executed. The Murphy law can be applied for the cast and crew: whatever could have gone wrong did go wrong for the makers of this movie. Other than the cinematography, they got nothing right. Red Riding Hood is just a really bad movie.
–Manal Faheem Khan
*CINEMATIC SUICIDE
**FORGETTABLE
***WATCHABLE
****COLLECTIBLE
*****AWARD-WORTH |
