Hoodwinked

Hoodwinked is a great movie for kids, but anyone over the age of 10 would be advised to skip this film entirely. A sardonic alternate version of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale, this movie fails where Shrek succeeded. I'm sure kids will greatly enjoy it, but the crossover appeal to adults is virtually nonexistent, as Hoodwinked is only mildly entertaining at best.

When Little Red Riding Hood aka "Red" (Anne Hathaway) enters her Granny's cabin in the woods, she finds the seemingly "Big Bad" Wolf (Patrick Warburton) disguised and laying in ambush for her. Just when it seems as though she is about to be eaten, her Granny (Glenn Close) bursts out of the closet all tied up, and an axe-wielding woodsman (James Belushi) crashes through the window, ostensibly to save everyone from the wolf. However, when the police arrive moments later, everyone is taken in for questioning by Nicky Flippers (David Ogden Stiers), where four different versions of the events leading up to the cabin scene are given by the aforementioned characters. The incident is somehow intrinsically linked with the recent thefts by the Recipe Bandit, who has been putting local bakeries out of business by stealing all of the recipes in the woods. Granny's famous baked goods are the last remaining recipes to be stolen, so presumably, the showdown at Granny's cabin holds the clues to uncovering the identity of the bandit.

The problem with this movie was that the humor was much to obvious and overused--not just in this film but in many, many animated films before it. For example, Gramma is an extreme sports addict and talks like a young hipster--this was pretty funny in the Boost Mobile Phone commercials last year, as well as in the Shrek movies, but come on. It's not just inherently funny to watch an old grandma skiing down the slopes or bungee jumping, there has to be more to it than just that. There needs to be something clever behind the image itself, but unfortunately this was not the case.

There were some moments that I found amusing, a few lines here and there that made me smile, but on the whole the movie was rather boring. I started feeling a bit hopeful by the middle, when it suddenly got a whole lot better, but things quickly tapered off again by the end, leaving me with a definite taste of mediocrity. The Wolf's photographer, an excitable squirrel named Twitchy, was perhaps the movie's saving grace, as every scene in which Twitchy appeared was one in which I heaved a sigh of relief. To a certain extent, the other characters were reasonably entertaining as well, but only in brief snatches of time that were always followed by something hopelessly lame. The film really shot itself in the foot, however, when it chose to have the rabbit character voiced by Andy Dick--I trust that no further elaboration on that point is necessary.

As I said before, this is a movie that a lot of kids will really like, as the humor is very simplistic and innocently juvenile. It's not quite as toxic as something along the lines of The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl, which had me practically spitting with rage, but this is still not the kind of animated film that adults will enjoy on a different level from kids. What I'm saying is that it won't kill you to take a kid to see this movie, but I don't suggest going to see this of your own volition. You won't be pleased. Five years ago, Hoodwinked might have passed for something a lot more amusing, but after two fantastic Shrek movies and a zillion other Pixar films, this movie just doesn't make the cut to the Varsity level.