Red Riding Hood (2011)

  Sometimes, if I'm not feeling too particular, I'll go to the theater and see whichever movie is playing the soonest.  Saturday's trip to Red Riding Hood reminded me why I should stop doing that.

It's not that the movie sucks, although I didn't like it.  It's not that I paid to see a movie that I didn't like.  I chose it.  I said "yeah, okay, I'll watch that" instead of "hell no" and picking something else.  I suppose that some deeply buried part of me was curious how they were going to handle it.  This is a favorite fairy tale of mine, what with the gore and devouring of defenseless old ladies.  I wanted an epic vision that encompassed all that.

Instead, I got Twilight Redux.  Amanda Seyfried's Valerie shows a bit more spark and personality than her sparkly-vampire-lovin' counterpart, but still gets all wide-eyed and dithering over which of the two eligible bachelors she should settle down with:  the goody-two-shoes rich guy her parents picked out, or the rough-and-tumble smoldering bad boy.  Apparently, in this narrative, it's unseemly for the heroine to have them both.  Anyway, her village has been living with a werewolf for a couple of generations and after her sister gets killed, the local priest calls in a famed werewolf hunter named Father Solomon to kill the beast, but he ends up whipping the populace into a frenzy of paranoia and suspicion when he suggests that the werewolf is one of the townspeople.  Duh, that's what werewolf means.

I think if I had to describe this movie in one word it would be 'overwrought'.  It just tries too hard.  Too hard to be tragically romantic (they both love her, who should she pick?!), too hard to be suspenseful (is one of them the werewolf?!  /gasp), too hard to be a morality play (OMG she's a witch because she's wearing red!  Kill her!).  Not even dauntless co-stars like Gary Oldman, and Julie Christie can pull its nose out of the dirt.  Special shout-out to Lukas Haas as the priest.  He needs more roles.

The werewolf looks more like a Shetland Pony than a menacing beast, but otherwise the visual effects were pretty decent.  Honestly, there's no excuse for bad CGI anymore.  The cinematography is beautiful, but it all seems like stuff you've seen before and seen better.

The inquisition/witch-hunt parts in particular seemed shoehorned in to make Father Solomon more of a judgmental zealot but it just never feels like part of the character.  Props to them for bringing a variation on the Brazen Bull in the form of an Iron Elephant, though.

  The Brazen Bull was a torture device used back in Ancient Greek and then Roman days.  It was not, however, historically used by the priests of the Inquisitions but it is a spectacularly nasty device and makes a stunning point if you're trying to convince people to cease a certain activity.