3/10
If you go down to the woods today, you'd better go in disguise, because there's a werewolf waiting to take a big bite out of you. Unless you fall asleep from boredom before then. Because this film has all the menace of a 20 year old corgi with false teeth. There is no danger, no romance, and nothing to stir the blood.
Even by Hollywood's standards, this is tame, lame stuff. Based very loosely on the fairy story, this is just an excuse for director Catherine Hardwicke, who made the first Twilight movie, to revisit the storyline that made that series so popular. Young woman torn between two hunky young men is threatened by a shapeshifting monster.
The film is set in a bizarrely unconvincing Hollywoodised medieval village, where Valerie (Amanda Seyfried) is in love with Peter, a woodcutter, but engaged to Henry (Max, son of Jeremy, Irons) because her family want her to do better for herself (Henry is a blacksmith). Her grandmother (Julie Christie) lives away from the village in the woods (why?), so we know something major is going to happen there at the end - "What big teeth you have, grandma." The major ongoing topic of conversation in the village is the presence of a wolf (or werewolf), which has recently killed Valerie's sister Lucy, and although the villagers set off into the mountains and kill a wolf, there's still danger on the edge of town. Enter Father Solomon (Gary Oldman), a priest/werewolf hunter who tows a metal elephant as part of his entourage, and has a troupe of heavily armed men who take over the village. And then it's a matter of working out which of the main characters is really the werewolf. Agatha Christie in the Middle Ages.
In fact one of the many oddities of the film is the various cinematic allusions that keep cropping up. The presence of Julie Christie and the red hooded cape inevitably brings to mind Don't Look Now, while Gary Oldman's arrival evokes both The Scarlet Letter, and The Crucible, as he turns the village upside down in his quest for witchcraft. It's hard to say if this is intentional, and if it is, what is the purpose. But the whole film has a random, cobbled-together feel about it. Apart from the budget, you could almost imagine this was something that had been hastily assembled one wet Sunday afternoon by a trio of enthusiastic ten year olds with a vivid imagination and no concerns about continuity or plausibility, and then performed in front of their parents after supper. Characters appear and disappear with no obvious reason; stuff happens that seems to have no connection to anything else. No real attempt is made to create a believable sense of time and place. Snow falls with monotonous regularity but no one is ever cold. In fact the whole thing makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Given the lack of any interesting relationships, there isn't a lot to recommend. Watch The Company Of Wolves instead.
