Red Riding Hood

Dir. Catherine Hardwicke
Starring. Amanda Seyfried, Gary Oldman, Billy Burke

Many of us may a feel overwhelmed by the giant wave (or tsunami if you feel like you want to add a little tastelessness to your day) of live action fairy tale remakes coursing through Hollywood. If you haven't been keeping up, this includes three different Snow Whites, a Hansel and Gretel, the already released Beauty and the Beast modernization "Beastly", and a few Peter Pan prequels. No news as to whether or not my Little Miss Muffet screenplay has been optioned. I will keep you updated.

Red Riding Hood is just the beginning of what promises to be a quickly exhausted studio trend. If I had any hope that this fad was going to turn classic tales into darkly foreboding masterpieces in the vein of 2006's "Pan's Labyrinth," "Red Riding Hood" was first in line to dash those hopes to bits.

Catherine Hardwicke, who has been embarrassingly hailed as the most successful female director in Hollywood, helms this bland re-imagining of Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf in which Red is a pouty, wide-eyed, teenager, Valerie (Amanda Seyfried), and the baddie is a werewolf terrorizing her village. When Father Soloman (Oldman) arrives on the scene, he informs the villagers that anyone of them could be the wolf, including either of Valerie's two handsome-ish suitors, thus inciting a paranoid witch hunt. This could have made for a fun twist on the old tale, but the whodunnit nature of the story just feels tired and fails to produce any actual twists.

Hardwicke is clearly milking her undeserved Twilight success for all it's worth, by once again portraying a young girl experiencing a sexual awakening that is fueled by danger and supernatural powers, starring a lot of pale people in a world that is overly color corrected to an unnatural blueish green. Unfortunately, this is a very poor attempt at recapturing whatever it is about Twilight that managed to ensnare the imaginations of women (and possibly men) of all ages the world over. It so completely misses the mark, it just feels like a desperate shot in the dark by someone who never fully understood what it was she was aiming for in the first place.

I can't imagine even the most prudish of teens will find this particularly sexy. The few kissing scenes just felt awkward. I found myself wondering if the actors were somehow related in real life (they aren't). Instead, it is just a case of the well cast Seyfried desperately trying to spark some chemistry, while her male counterparts just seem a bit lost or possibly harmfully restricted by their tight leather pants. It makes for a passion that is lukewarm at best.

Overall, this film is shallow and ridiculous and vastly misdirected, but ultimately harmless. Let's just hope everyone else with fairy tale remakes on their agendas are taking notes on what not to do.