Movie Review - Red Riding Hood

Red Riding Hood
Appian Way

100 mins.

March 11, 2011

Rated: PG-13

Grimm’s fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood is one that probably all children learn at some point in their childhood. Here, Catherine Hardwicke, director of another film you may have heard of, Twilight, brings the tale to the screen with a more supernatural tone.

I will say that I was a little torn about this movie before seeing it. The trailer (posted below) looks great but they kept promoting it as “from the director of Twilight”, like I did above, and that made me a little uneasy. I have had no desire to see or read the Twilight series, so I was hoping that it wouldn’t be too similar.

The actual tale as told by the brothers Grimm is only 4 pages long, so they really had to flesh out the story to get it to the 100 minutes you see on screen. That being said, they really created a world for the story to take place. It is a sort of medieval type village – which looked great on film. There was a pretty cool festival that took place too. They switched the regular old wolf to a werewolf, which even that I was ok with because it added to the sense of hysteria that there was from time to time when these sorts of witch hunts took place. You were able to get a sense of the legends and fears that people would have had about the supernatural. All of the main features of the Grimm story are here – the wolf, the way they get rid of the wolf, the red cloak, the “Grandma, what big eyes you have!” lines – it was all there and integrated well with the rest of the story they created.  The ending was an interesting twist that was welcomed even though I would have preferred a different ending for the characters involved.

There is the requisite girl torn between two equally hunky guys – one being the good guy and one more  of the “bad boy” type. Great to look at! I found myself rooting for the bad boy of course, doesn’t everyone?!  There were some overtones of Twilight, the above mentioned girl torn between guy scenario, werewolves, and would you believe that Taylor Lautner was considered for the role of the "bad boy"?  Talk about being type cast - let's put him in another film about...werewolves!

I thought that the cast was well selected. Amanda Seyfried was a good choice for Red, in this film known as Valerie. The two men she is torn between (Max Irons and Shiloh Fernandez) were better than I expected. But the guy who really knew is part and did it well was Gary Oldman – he was the guy brought into town who knows how to get rid of the werewolf – and he was creepy and mean!

Overall, I thought the film was wonderful and better than my expectations. It is by no means an award winning film (unless for the set design, which was awesome) but still enjoyable to watch. I will be getting this on DVD when it comes out – maybe even a splurge for on Blue-ray? As my boyfriend also enjoyed it and several of my guy friends wanted to see it, I would say that you might be able to con that man in your life to seeing it with you(!).

PG-13 for some violence, creative terror scenes and sensuality

Check out the trailer:

Copyright © 2011 by The Maiden’s Court