Red Riding Hood (2011) 
 
 The bluenose brigade at the Motion Picture Association of America has stamped “ Red Riding Hood ” with a PG-13 rating for “violence and creature terror, and some sensuality.” Certainly this goofily amusing screen fairy tale includes bloodshed, but it’s generally tamer than its often-gruesome source. The creature terror meanwhile isn’t remotely frightening, though the designated mustache twirler (and scene chewer) Gary Oldman tries to rustle up scares. As to sensuality, Amanda Seyfried as You-Know-Who makes a delectable treat whether heaving her bosom or boogieing down in a bacchanal that’s more Burning Man than Bruegel . 
 
 At this point in her short movie career Ms. Seyfried hasn’t often been asked to do more than hit her marks and deliver her lines, which she does appealingly in “Red Riding Hood.” What she mostly brings to her movies is otherworldly, unthreatening beauty — she has the saucer eyes and heart-shaped face of an anime pixie — and that elusive gift of cinematic presence. When she’s on camera, she draws all eyes to her, something that the director here, Catherine Hardwicke, grasps. Ms. Hardwicke is an uneven, at times careless filmmaker, but as she showed in movies like “Thirteen” and the first “Twilight,” she is attuned to beauty and has a way with young actors, tapping their energy so it buzzes on screen. 
 
 From the start Ms. Hardwicke tries to make the case that this isn’t your granny’s favorite fairy tale. The story opens with its heroine, Valerie, as a child (Megan Charpentier), strolling about in trousers (the other girls are in dresses) while in voice-over Ms. Seyfried insists that she tried to be a good girl. But goodness had nothing to do with it, as Mae West once quipped, or so Ms. Hardwicke seems to want us to believe. Before long Valerie has run off with a boy pointedly named Peter (first D J Greenburg, later Shiloh Fernandez with hair gel), and they’re frolicking in the forest and snaring a rabbit. Valerie urges Peter to slay the animal, but he can’t or won’t, and the sequence ends with her holding a knife to the bunny like a natural-born killer. 
 
 The suggestion that Red Riding Hood might be as much predator as prey isn’t new. She may be the intended victim, but she’s also the one who (after sizing up the wolf in bed) ends triumphant. It’s this blurring between the antagonists as well as the flexibility of the story’s morals and meanings that make it work well for different readers and writers. In the 17th century Charles Perrault turned an oral folk tale into “Le Petit Chaperon Rouge,” and three centuries later Angela Carter gave the story a wicked, feminist spin. Ms. Hardwicke doesn’t acknowledge “The Company of Wolves,” Carter’s brilliant retelling, but it’s probable that she read it or saw Neil Jordan’s dreary 1984 big-screen adaptation. 
 
 But, my, what sharp teeth Ms. Hardwicke doesn’t have: working from David Leslie Johnson’s screenplay she takes on the story’s grown-up themes of sex and death directly but weakly. This might be because the movie has been pitched at young adults, as evidenced by its pretty leads, electronic soundtrack, contemporary vibe and veneer, and caution. Some of the updating works — a proto-hippie witchy woman, the grandmother (Julie Christie) now rocks the screen in dreadlocks — but at other times the modern touches feel like sloppiness or even pandering. It’s hard to know, for instance, if Ms. Hardwicke, a former production designer, didn’t notice that the clothing looks straight from the costume department, or whether she (or her producers) didn’t want to turn off their presumptive audience with anything, you know, old. 
 
 The introduction of a religious zealot, Father Solomon (Mr. Oldman), adds some busywork drama and action. Summoned to vanquish the computer-generated wolf (an underfed brother to the ludicrous lupine beasts in the “Twilight” franchise), the padre arrives with an armed multicultural entourage and, in a flamboyant touch, a torture chamber cum Easy-Bake Oven shaped like an elephant. (Unlucky prisoners are slow-roasted inside.) At one point Valerie worries with good reason that Father Solomon might mistake her for a witch. But this nod at historic female troubles doesn’t go anywhere, largely because Valerie spends so much time negotiating between dueling loves, Peter and a wealthier suitor, Henry (Max Irons), while juggling her mother, Suzette (Virginia Madsen, rouged and Maybellined), and father, Cesaire (Billy Burke). 
 
 When the wolf in one of Carter’s Red Riding Hood stories explains to the girl why he has big teeth — “All the better to eat you with” — she bursts out laughing. “She knew,” Carter writes, “she was nobody’s meat.” Her insouciance is thrilling. Ms. Hardwicke wants to have her feminism and fairy tale, but Carter’s no-prisoners bad attitude is too far out for an entertainment like “Red Riding Hood,” where only the appearance of girl power will finally do. Given this, it’s worth noting that Ms. Hardwicke, who is deeply enamored of aerial photography, sends the camera repeatedly soaring over the landscape where sometimes a woman in a red cloak as vivid as blood walks with a man across the snowy expanse. It’s a striking image suggestive of freedom, though perhaps it’s really just the guy who this little fairy-tale fugitive needs to escape from. 
 
 “Red Riding Hood” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Wolf violence and make-out sessions. 
 
 RED RIDING HOOD 
 
 Opens on Friday nationwide. 
 
 Directed by Catherine Hardwicke; written by David Leslie Johnson; director of photography, Mandy Walker; edited by Nancy Richardson; music by Brian Reitzell and Alex Heffes; production design by Tom Sanders; costumes by Cindy Evans; produced by Jennifer Davisson Killoran, Leonardo DiCaprio and Julie Yorn; released by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. 
 
 WITH: Amanda Seyfried (Valerie), Megan Charpentier (Young Valerie), Gary Oldman (Solomon), Billy Burke (Cesaire), Shiloh Fernandez (Peter), D J Greenburg (Young Peter), Max Irons (Henry), Virginia Madsen (Suzette), Lukas Haas (Father Auguste) and Julie Christie (Grandmother). ||||| Red Riding Hood (PG-13) Ebert: Users: 
 
 Red Riding Hood BY ROGER EBERT / March 10, 2011 March 10, 2011 Cast & Credits Valerie Amanda Seyfried 
 
 Father Solomon Gary Oldman 
 
 Father Auguste Lukas Haas 
 
 Grandmother Julie Christie 
 
 Peter Shiloh Fernandez 
 
 Cesaire Billy Burke 
 
 Henry Max Irons 
 
 Suzette Virginia Madsen 
 
 
 
 Warner Bros. presents a film directed by Catherine Hardwicke. Written by David Johnson. Running time: 100 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for violence and creature terror, and some sensuality). Printer-friendly » 
 
 E-mail this to a friend » Of the classics of world literature crying out to be filmed as a sexual fantasy for teenage girls, surely "Red Riding Hood" is far down on the list. Here's a movie that cross-pollinates the "Twilight" formula with a werewolf and adds a girl who always wears a red hooded cape, although I don't recall her doing any riding. It's easy to imagine a story conference in which they said: Hey! Let's switch the vampires with a werewolf and recycle the theme of a virgin attracted to a handsome but dangerous hunk, only let's get two hunks! What this inspiration fails to account for is that while a young woman might toy with the notion of a vampire boyfriend, she might not want to mate with a wolf. Although she might think it was, like, cool to live in the woods in Oregon, she might not want to live in the Black Forest hundreds of years ago because, like, can you text from there? 
 
 
 
 "Red Riding Hood" has the added inconvenience of being dreadfully serious about a plot so preposterous, it demands to be filmed by Monty Python. All that amused me was a dream sequence where Grandma says, “The better to eat you with.” I'm asking myself, “How can Red Riding Hood dream about dialogue in her own fairy tale when she hasn't even gone over the hill and through the dale to grandmother's house yet?” 
 
 
 
 The movie was directed by Catherine Hardwicke, who made the first "Twilight" film. "Red Riding Hood" opens with computer-generated shots of hundreds of square miles of forests, dotted here and there by grim, stubby castles. Then we meet the narrator, Valerie, who always wears a red cape. She is but a lass when she steals away with Peter, her pre-pubescent boyfriend, so they can trap a bunny rabbit and possibly slit its throat, although the camera moves away from the bunny at the crucial moment to focus upon their faces as the young actors think, “OK, this is where they flash forward, and we are replaced by Amanda Seyfried and Shiloh Fernandez.” 
 
 
 
 They live in a village that is one of the oddest non-places in the history of production design. Because the original fairy tale was by the Brothers Grimm, I suppose there's a chance the village is in Germany, but it exists outside time and space, and seems to have been inspired by little plastic souvenir villages in airport gift shops. You know, populated mit Hansel und Gretel. 
 
 
 
 Valerie (Seyfried) wants to marry Peter (Fernandez), who is a wood chopper, but her parents have betrothed her to a rich kid named Henry (Max Irons). The village since time immemorial has been terrorized by a werewolf, who turns up when the moon is full and must be pacified by a pathetic little piggie left chained to a stump, lest it develop an appetite for villagers. Valerie's sister is found dead, amidst distracting cone-shaped haystacks dotted with purple flowers, which is not the sort of detail you want to be noticing when a young girl has been killed (spoiler!) not eaten by a werewolf. 
 
 
 
 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. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

– Catherine Hardwicke’s take on Red Riding Hood, the classic story doused in teen angst and good looks, is certainly riding the zeitgeist—but it never really enters the woods, critics say: The film is “gorgeously shot, smartly conceived, cleverly cast, badly executed—the lush medieval beauty here is at best only skin deep,” writes Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times. “Sometimes, it's literate and lofty. More of the time, it's mind-numbingly simplistic and served up on a platter like leftovers.” Imagine the story conference, suggests Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Hey! Let's switch the vampires with a werewolf and recycle the theme of a virgin attracted to a handsome but dangerous hunk, only let's get two hunks!” Plus, it’s “dreadfully serious about a plot so preposterous, it demands to be filmed by Monty Python.” In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis is fairly positive, calling the film a “goofily amusing screen fairy tale.” But when it comes to the darker themes, “what sharp teeth Ms. Hardwicke doesn’t have.”