The 9 Most Scathing Critical Responses to Red Riding Hood
How bad are the reviews for Red Riding Hood? Well, Beastly -- which was so unanimously reviled it even got lampooned on Saturday Night Live last week -- scored a fresh rating three times higher than what Catherine Hardwicke's fairytale is currently rocking on Rotten Tomatoes. Yikes. Ahead, nine of the sharpest barbs against Red Riding Hood.
9. "Red Riding Hood [...] actually had the potential of being something fresh, because it was directed by the femme-centric Catherine Hardwicke, who made the brutally honest coming-of-age movie Thirteen. But since that auspicious debut, Hardwicke has directed the drab Virgin Mary movie The Nativity Story and the turgid first Twilight flick. Apparently Hardwicke's been bitten by the rabid curse of Hollywood, because Red Riding Hood is such a sorrowful attempt to resurrect the marketing magic of Twilight that it ought to be titled 'Career Eclipse.' -- Joe Williams, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
8. "The amazingly awful dramatic thriller Red Riding Hood could, with tweaks, be enjoyably bad in a Plan 9 From Outer Space kind of way. Instead, it's M. Night Shyamalan-style bad, which means despite all the unintentional snickers, you feel trapped. [...] Director Catherine Hardwicke, whose first Twilight film looks like Citizen Kane with fangs compared to this, takes things sooo seriously, which translates as buffoonery." -- Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News
7. "Was Red Riding Hood masterminded by a cadre of particularly silly 11-year-olds undergoing withdrawal from Twilight? That's the only excuse for a movie this dopey." -- Mary Pols, Time
6. "I can't decide whether it's setting out to be the Showgirls of medieval-fairy tale movies or simply getting there by accident." -- Andrew O'Hehir, Salon
5. "Mouthing flat, ludicrous dialogue, a lackluster cast repeatedly gathers to mill sheeplike around the village commons, as though no one's told them where to scare up some real action. The only show in town is religious nutcase-cum-dog-catcher Lord Solomon (Gary Oldman, embarrassingly channeling Laurence Olivier in his hammy, heavily-accented-villains period), who likes to speechify about the evils of lycanthropy. As Valerie's ambiguous Gram, the sublime Julie Christie is reduced to awful mugging as she explains why her molars are so large: The better to eat you with.'" -- Kat Murphy, MSN Movies
4. "But perhaps the greatest sin of Red Riding Hood is the way it reduces the normally fabulous Julie Christie into a hippie-dippie granny in medieval Eileen Fisher gear and dreadlocks. That, and the fact that the negative-space innocence of these townsfolk makes them seem even stupider than the denizens of M. Night Shyamalan's The Village. And that's pretty stupid." -- Stephanie Zacharek, Movieline
3. "What little girl doesn't hear the story of little Red and her riding hood and reinterpret the famed fairy tale into some tawdry excuse for implied bestiality? What female adolescent doesn't lay in her lonely, misunderstood bed at night and dream of having 'intimate relations' with a CG wolf whose seductive human eyes burn right through her? While Goths go on about sex with the dead, and the rest of tween nation pines away for the latest YouTube sensation, the creative minds behind Red Riding Hood want to sell you a silly bill of goods suggesting that nothing tweaks a gal's heart that a couple of lifeless hunks, a witch hunt, a blasphemous dose of The Crucible...and, of course, 'getting down', lycanthrope style." -- Bill Gibron, PopMatters
2. "Two weeks ago, it was Alex Pettyfer as a hunky, misunderstood alien prince in I Am Number Four, and last week he returned as a hunky, misunderstood teen ogre in Beastly. This week we've got werewolves, with Amanda Seyfried, doing her best to channel Bella, and the anonymously handsome Shiloh Fernandez and Max Irons as hunky, misunderstood potential wolfboys. It's like Team Edward and Team Jacob, except you can't tell the difference and you don't care." -- Ty Burr, Boston Globe
1. "The villagers send off for Father Solomon (Gary Oldman), a famed werewolf fighter, and he arrives with his band of warriors and a very large metal elephant. Solomon, an expert, knows that werewolves are not werewolves all the time, and in between full moons take the form of men. Therefore, one of the villagers must be a werewolf. This has enormous implications for Valerie's possible future love life. But I know my readers. Right now, you aren't thinking about Valerie's romance. You're thinking, Did I just read that Father Solomon arrived with a very large metal elephant? Yes, he did. A very large metal elephant. I thought the same thing. That must have been a hell of a lot of trouble. Even harder than Herzog dragging the boat over the mountain. Showing Father Solomon's men dragging a metal elephant through the woods -- there's your movie right there." -- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
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Comments
It was lampooned on Saturday Night Live? I thought they had lampooned the movie "Beastly." I don't remember them saying anything about "Red Riding Hood."
"Beastly" was parodied on SNL, which the article says in the 2nd sentence.
Critics are truly simple creatures. Of course that should go without saying, but the reviews of Red Riding Hood are far more absurd that the critics claim the movie to be. I saw it last night, it's an average quality movie, a little above average if you like fantasy movies. Shiloh Fernandez and Max Irons are weak and the pacing is off, but Seyfried, Oldman, and Christie give good performances, and it's beautifully shot and well scored. If you enjoy the genre you'll enjoy this movie.
The vast majority of the reviews for RRH fall into two camps. One hates Catherine Hardwicke because she directed the first Twilight. These are the Iblogfrommyparentsbasement.com "critics" who are otherwise known as fanboys. The second are mental pygmies who go to genre movies expecting to see something realistic. Nearly all mainstream critics fall into that camp.
Red Riding Hood is a fantasy movie, like Twilight, it has Billy Burke, and it has a love triangle with young people as a secondary plot line, but that's where the similarities end. It has different source material, it's set in a different time, and it has different actors, with one exception. It's also primarily a murder mystery/thriller, the teen love bit is not the most important part of the movie. Nonetheless, if you tell a bunch of simpletons (critics) that a movie is directed by the director of Twilight, it's automatically Twilight II in their eyes.
I thought the trailer made it look interesting enough for a rental, so I can relate to what you're saying about kneejerk critics (and bloggers who have no business being equals to professionals; Metacritic wisely dispenses of them).
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