Her name is Valerie. Why? Because "Bella" was already taken, duh! She’s a self-described “good girl,” although she needs to review the qualifications because I saw what went down in that pile of hay and so did like three other people. Then she went and bragged about it to her friends, which I thought even bad girls had too much tact to do. She believes that werewolves are creatures bred for their gifts of telepathy. GOSH!
Okay, seriously. I had high hopes for this, just like I had with Beastly earlier this month. Real faerie tales, not the ones involving singing mice and birds like in the Disney movies, but the ones where actions have consequences, are gritty things. Gritty things tend to make good movies. A reimaging of Little Red Riding Hood set in a modern urban landscape could have been a thing of beauty, especially if it had leaned a bit to the horror angle. What we got was some Twilight-ish afterbirth, wherein a moderately attractive, but stiff girl finds herself in a <3 triangle with both of her village’s most eligible bachelors. In addition we have tepid, angst-filled love scenes in a mostly evergreen forest and a telepathic werewolf. WHERE have I seen this before, Mr. DeVille? Like I needed one more reason to hate Twilight. Now it’s ruining completely unrelated movies.
A red herring works as a plot device. It really does, so long as you do it right. Leaving a trail of red herring in your wake suggests you need to reconsider your writing career. When Gary Oldman states the wolf is living in the village and the camera pans around to the villagers all looking accusingly at each other, I was laughing so hard I got shushed. I was a little annoyed since the person who shushed ME spent the first ten minutes of the movie on her phone. Sorry, Keisha, people in glass houses and all that.
What went right here? Precious little. I actually loved the wolf animations. They were pretty slick, even if he could reach out and touch you mind to mind. Plenty of werewolf movies failed because they opted for the wolfman option as opposed to a ginormous wolf... Red didn't make that same deal with the devil and their selection for their villain was well done. The movements on screen also suggested that someone had done some research on how real wolves moved. They also followed the old adage. Every village has its idiot, and I LOVED this one. Bravo, Claude, whoever and wherever you are. You were my favorite part of this movie. The setting and costuming were well done, I thought, although I would have though blue and purple would be less common in the time this all appeared to be referencing, but I could be wrong.
