Red Riding Hood

Appropriately enough for a story about werewolves, Red Riding Hood is half one thing and half another. The first thirty minutes or so are an eye-gougingly bad ’tween romance about blank-faced non-entities who mouth words of love without ever demonstrating the slightest hint of attraction or chemistry of any kind. Seriously, when the puppets in Team America sell a romance better, you’re on pretty shaky ground. It’s vapid, sexless and non-threatening. Perfect for children too young to know real love but old enough to dream about it, but it looks like poor acting and direction to the rest of us. A lot of the blame can be sheeted home to Shiloh Fernandez, the lacklustre male lead who seems to have been cast more for his passing resemblance to Robert Pattinson (of Twilight fame) than for any ability to convey emotion. But Amanda Seyfried as Valerie (aka Red Riding Hood) doesn’t do much better. It’s seriously depressing how little they seem interested in each other, with each profession of love proving the law of diminishing returns. And an attempted love triangle, when Valerie is promised to the local blacksmith’s son, just fizzles. To be fair though, that does have a vaguely diverting resolution, with decency rather than dramatics being the order of the day. That at least was a refreshing surprise.

But this is two films in one, and the annoyingly hollow romance story thankfully gives way with the arrival of Gary Oldman’s Solomon, werewolf hunter extraordinaire. Oldman hams it up masterfully, gleefully chewing the scenery as he loudly declaims the dangers of lycanthropy and works on the villager’s paranoia by highlighting that any one of them could be the foul beast. Solomon and his band of mercenaries (populated by a casting call for ethnic stereotypes) set quickly to work interrogating, setting traps and generally taking over everything. They are noble villains, dedicated to a high purpose but riding their good intentions straight to Hell. And when the werewolf makes its attack, the set-pieces are a lot of campy good fun. It’s so over-the-top and silly that you’ll have to laugh, as did a good chunk of the audience I was with. Oldman’s presence is a godsend, because suddenly Seyfried’s Valerie becomes an interesting character. It’s intriguing that a character can be so bland and then so interesting depending on who they interact with, and it really does hammer home the fact that the young male leads are all pretty lame.

Sadly, even Oldman can’t save Catherine Hardwicke's film, as eventually it must come back to the love story that fails because it’s impossible to believe there’s any love there. So the shifts between action, horror, romance and mystery fail to gel without that core story engine firing on any cylinder. Red Riding Hood wants to be a sleek lycanthrope, smoothly transforming before our eyes. But in reality it’s a cockatrice, a ridiculous stitching together of disparate elements that is only good for getting skewered and roasted.

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