Fantasy, 100 Minutes, 2011
A modern retelling of “Little Riding Hood” this movie works in a lot of ways. The setting is gorgeous and spooky and the build-up is well drawn. The dialog and acting are (I hope) meaningfully stilted: this is a fairy-tale after all.
You will have to toss aside all you know of the original story however (either the saccharine modern tellings or the darker original). There’s almost none of it present here. The characters are present, in one form or another, but nothing truly resembling what you may expect.
As the film progresses things unfortunately start to unravel more and more. The characters, which were interestingly single-dimensional for a short while become grating and melodramatic. The introduction of the “mad priest” figure is predictable and draws too much focus from the main story.
Most annoyingly the ending of the movie is completely silly. We get a tacked-on, utterly out-of-character “twist” and an a shallow attempt at a bittersweet “surprise” ending.
Unfortunately this simply seemed like yet another case of a studio/screen-writer wanting to cash in on a classic but falling victim to the hubris that they could “do it better”.
