Review of Red Riding Hood (2011) by Filipeneto — 25 Sep 2021

A few years ago, a series of films for teenagers and young adults emerged from traditional fables and tales, giving us new stories full of adventure, action and CGI. It was a fashion that gave us blockbusters like "Snow White and the Huntsman" (2012), "Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters" (2013), "Dracula Untold" (2014) and others. Some were more successful, others quickly fell by the wayside and there is not much to talk about them now, ten years later. This is one of the movies that ended up being forgotten.

The film's problem begins when director Catherine Hardwicke decided to try to reissue the huge success she achieved, years before, with the "Twilight" franchise, based on the timeless story of Little Red Riding Hood: nothing easier than making the innocent and disobedient girl from the classic story in a hot-blooded teenager who, against her family's will, lives a burning passion with a boy from the same village, a village we don't know where it is but is isolated in the middle of a dense forest where a werewolf lives. And we have the elements for a story that appeals to young people, full of action, fights, suspense and, of course, sexual appeals that just don't go any further because it's a film for young people.

To talk about the cast, we first have to talk about something that usually bothers me a lot whenever I see a period film: the anachronistic errors. Assuming that cinema is a field of entertainment, I try to be reasonable with this, but I value a film that respects the past. There are mistakes that can be forgiven: the wrong kind of weapon, food that didn't exist at the time... but it's harder to forgive if the entire cast decides to behave like they're in the 21st century. Unfortunately, that's what happens here, and it adds to the bad material and the bad dialogues given to the characters.

Amanda Seyfried is beautiful, and the film knows how to explore the attributes of the actress. However, she is a 21st century girl dressed in medieval clothes. Shiloh Fernandez and Max Irons don't even try to look medieval, and Lukas Haas could be anything but a priest. Even stranger is to see Gary Oldman give life to a hybrid character, who mixes a witch hunter and a fanatical inquisitor with a Catholic bishop, in purple robes and a pectoral cross, who only lacks the miter, the crosier and the cape! There are good actresses (Virginia Madsen, Julie Christie) with characters who are totally insipid and uninteresting. The inclusion of black actors is a sign of their racial integration, but the Middle Ages were not politically correct and nothing helps me to understand what they do in the middle of medieval Central Europe, retrograde and isolated from people coming from so far away. It was a casting mistake that the script doesn't even bother to explain. For what?

It is in the technical aspects that the film finds some redeeming elements: the cinematography is truly good and makes good use of elements such as fire, the flickering candlelight, the shadows of a rustic house, a misty and gloomy forest environment. The sets and even the costumes fulfill their role well, even though the director's lack of concern with the chronology has given rise to a mixture of bad taste of medieval elements from various periods and different moments (remember that the Middle Ages lasted practically a thousand years). The action and fight scenes work and help to give the film some movement, they fit more into the context of the film than that brief attempt at a sex scene by Seyfried in the straw, which will only serve to keep the boys looking at her cleavage. The CGI, and especially the wolf, is somewhat disappointing and the soundtrack sucks.