Review of Hoodwinked Too! Hood VS. Evil (2011) by Jennifer F — 29 Apr 2011

Insert witty one-liner about how this movie completely, totally dropped the ball.

I loved Hoodwinked. Personally, I liked it even more than Shreck (even though it is a lot worse, and not just because it's such a significant rip-off of it); it was a direct, funny story with funny characters; the twist it put on the fairy tale was excellent.

That's where this sequel mostly fails. The first film was about showing us the fairy tale like we normally see it... then twisting it, and twisting it some more. And it's funnier every time it happens. It's like "BOOM, this is a totally and retardedly stupid change to the story" and it's hilarious. Watching the first one, discovering that Granny secretly has a need for speed? Hysterical.

But with Hoodwinked TOO, it just starts out with everything already twisted. It's like "here are the characters of the Red Riding Hood story, and Hansel and Grettel, and a frog, all mixed together doing random stuff. Does it make any sense? No. Is that supposed to be funny? Well, we're not making any jokes about it, so no." To do a sequel to a movie like this, you have to kind of reset. You have to start back off with a grounded, familiar story before pissing all over it becomes funny.

Maybe it would have been better if the story had gone like this:

The story of Hansel and Grettel plays out, totally serious, just the way the story actually goes, and then at some point, right before they get killed or something, the cast from the first movie appear. And it's like "WHAT? The characters of Little Red Riding Hood? Why is this completely unrelated fairy tale mixed up? Why are they all teaming up and working together instead of fighting? And why is granny so badass? This is off the wall hilarity!" And make them cross paths through means more original than just "they're a special forces team sent to rescue them".

You have to set things up to be funny in order for them to be funny. You can't just have funny things there and expect them to tell the joke for you. I mean, this is BELOW comedy 101; you'd have to know stuff this basic before they even let you through the door.

There's a lot more to complain about. But that one, single fact was at least 75% of this movie's faults. Yeah, it's not a mystery as to what this movie failed at. It's pretty simple.

I want to at least focus on the good things:

1: Most of the characters from the first movie are still cool. Red's still a badass, her grandma is still a badass, the wolf is still cool, and Twitchy is still fun and surprisingly 3-dimensional. They're just not funny anymore. Oh, and they spend way too much time dwelling on their emotional problems. Jeesh movie, Hoodwinked 1 spent like only a few scenes to this crap, but you spend about half the screen-time dwelling on it. Knock it off!

2: The action scenes are nice. Yeah even though the animation is still really bad (although it's actually a huge improvement over the last movie (ALTHOUGH although, this one seems to have some horrible lip-sync issues, which is just unacceptable)), the car chase/fight scenes are really well directed and pretty exciting. Better than most animated movies nowadays. And boy would all this action be sweet if it were tied to a plot I gave any remote care to.

But as it is, the only thing I care about for this movie is the people who made it; I want to know, did they screw up, did they fall asleep, did the production stress sabotage them, or did they just accidentally make the first Hoodwinked as clever and awesome as it was?