The film begins as it means to go on: Red Riding Hood, here named Valerie (Amanda Seyfried), is spying on some shirtless lumberjacks in the middle of a forest. It's very badly lit, with ridiculous soft focus shafts of light falling through the trees, which for some reason, all have toothpicks coming out of them. The toothpick-trees are only half as wooden as Seyfried and Shiloh Fernandez, who plays Peter, the lumberjack Valerie is "in love with". They have no chemistry. At all. They spend the entire film looking at each other like they've just met. Apparently the two had met before they made the film and didn't like each other and Seyfried only took the role after Hardwicke persuaded her. It shows.
Valerie might be "in love with" Peter, but she's engaged to another man, Henry (Max Irons, Jeremy's son). Oh, what will Valerie do? What will Peter do? "If you love her", Valerie's mother (Virginia Madsen) says to Peter, "You'll let her go", I finished for her. Silly, clichéd dialogue aside, we quickly move onto the action. Valerie is told her sister has been killed by a werewolf and we're shown her dead body, which hardly has a scratch on it. She's been mauled to death by a giant fucking werewolf and she looks like she tripped over something. Brilliant, we won't even get some gory deaths to make up for the rest of the film. A band of villagers decide to kill the wolf, setting off straight away so as to ambush it during the day because apparently werewolves burst into flames in sunlight. Just how obsessed with vampires is Hardwicke? Anyway, they set off straight away, and get to its cave in the middle of the night. That makes complete sense. Henry's father is killed and the rest of them come back with it's head just as Gary Oldman turns up.
If everyone else in the film is as wooden as the toothpick-trees, Oldman's as hammy as the pigs they sacrifice to try and appease the wolf. He plays the mad Father Solomon, a man with silver fingernails (remember that) who rants about the wolf and the red moon until the wolf turns up. And it's awful. It's all CGI and it's neither convincing nor scary. It kills some people and telepathically tells Valerie to come away with it. I'm sure someone could have made a good film here. Give any aspiring director the job and tell them that if they make it anything like Twilight you'll stick them inside Father Solomon's giant metal elephant and you'd end up with a better, darker film than this.
Anyway, for the next hour or so the wolf kills people very cleanly and people are accused and suspected of being the wolf. Then, Solomon decides to duel it. Unfortunately, he duels like a little girl and the wolf bites his arm off. The wolf tells Valerie to come with it, she refuses and goes to her grandma's house. Once there, she finds that her grandma (Julie Christie) is dead and her father (Billy Burke) is revealed as the werewolf, like anyone cares. He shares some boring dialogue with Valerie until Peter attacks him with the world's smallest axe and Valerie stabs him in the chest with Solomon's severed arm, killing him with the SILVER FUCKING FINGERNAILS. I'd say it's an anti-climactic end to the film, but that would imply that the film had been building towards something. Either way, it's the stupidest death since Mr. Big swallowed a bullet of compressed air and floated away like a balloon in Octopussy. During the fight with Valerie's father, Henry was bitten, meaning he will become a werewolf, but not before he and Valerie have sex and make werebabies. "If Amanda Seyfried goes topless, would that be enough to save this film?", I mused to myself as the couple started kissing. It wouldn't have been, even if she had done.
Skip Red Riding Hood and watch The Company of Wolves or An American Werewolf in London instead. Gary Oldman's ham can't save this rubbish, although it does at least trundle along despite its runtime of one hour and forty minutes. If it dragged, it would have gotten even fewer points.
3 out of 10.
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