A Rashomon-style riff on the Red Riding Hood fable that’s visualized with Make Way for Noddy-grade animation, Hoodwinked is so lacking in cleverness or humor that it makes the similar fairy tale-rewriting Shrek series seem downright Shakespearean by comparison. Director Cory Edwards’ film involves a frog detective’s (David Ogden Stiers) investigation into a goodie bandit, which leads him to four suspects: Red (Anne Hathaway), Granny (Glenn Close), The Woodsman (James Belushi) and the big bad Wolf (Patrick Warburton). Each of these protagonists has a different version of the night in question’s events, and those tales all reveal secrets about their teller’s true nature, so that Red is actually a martial arts badass, Granny is an extreme-sports snowboarder, and the Wolf is a reporter with a hyperactive squirrel sidekick. Such dull reinventions are typical of this one-joke fiasco, which boasts plastic-y characters and environments that look direct-to-video cheap, as well as musical numbers that prove as half-baked as the story’s plotting. Eventually ditching its Kurosawa-inspired early structure for a more traditional chase-the-bad-guy formula, and yet still somnambulistic from start to finish, it’s a film whose title clearly refers to its paying-customer audience.
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