HOODWINKED

It's messy, noisy, crazy, fast-paced, and seems to go on and on... not exactly a winning combination.

I hate to say it, but I think I may have to steer clear of computer animated movies for awhile. I never get tired of Shrek, but we seem to be on a downhill slide. The Polar Express was unbearable, Chicken Little was stupid, and now Hoodwinked almost leaves me at a loss for words. It's messy, noisy, crazy, fast-paced, and seems to go on and on... not exactly a winning combination.

I should begin by saying that I wanted to like Hoodwinked. I was in the mood for mindless easy-to-follow entertainment, and at first I thought I'd found just the thing. As the film begins, it looks promising enough. Little Red Riding Hood (voiced by Anne Hathaway) sets out to visit her grandmother with a basket of goodies. When she arrives, a wolf is in her grandmother's bed. After the old "what big teeth" conversation, Red and The Wolf (Patrick Warburton) face off Matrix style. By now the Matrix fight has been ripped off so many times that it's getting to be a spoof of a spoof. Can we please let this joke die?

Red and The Wolf are engaging in their elaborate martial arts moves when The Woodsman (Jim Belushi) comes crashing through the window with his axe, and Granny tumbles out of the closet all tied up. The police then converge on the scene led by a cool-looking frog detective named Nicky Flippers (David Ogden Stiers). At this point things are still looking good. The wacky action and weird one-liners make you think you're in for a full-fledged fun time, but the storyline immediately starts to deteriorate.

For the rest of the movie, the characters take turns telling their side of the story to the cops. How did they all come to be at Granny's house at that moment in time? Honestly, it's just not very interesting, and whoever thought we needed to probe deeper into the tale of Little Red Riding Hood should have his head examined.

We begin with Red's story. She was at Grandma's house because she was visiting. That's a pretty dull story, so they throw in a bunch of gobbledygook about stolen recipes. Apparently the thief is ruining the goody business for the woodland folk, so Red takes her family's recipes out of the vault to keep an eye on them. On the way to Grandma's, she chats with Boingo the Bunny (Andy Dick), who may not be as froo-froo and sweet as he seems. Red herself has a bit of a chip on her shoulder, and isn't particularly endearing in any traditional sense of the word. I guess cynicism is the new black for little children.

The Wolf turns out to be some sort of investigative reporter looking into the mystery of the missing recipes, so he was just doing some research at Granny's—she was tied up when he got there. Really! Granny's secretly into extreme sports, and her parachute got caught in the ceiling fan, wound all around her and shot her into the closet. This news is profoundly hurtful to Red, who thought she and Granny shared everything. Sniff!

Meanwhile, The Woodsman had no intention of saving the day. He's an actor, you see, and he was just rehearsing for his call back, when all of a sudden he was rolling down the hill on a log and catapulting through Granny's window. Um, would any little kid find stolen recipes, investigative reporters, and call backs even remotely interesting? Would any adult? Ultimately the whole story becomes so convoluted and tiresome that you just want it to be over. The barrage of cheesy, forgettable songs pushes you ever nearer to pressing the stop button on the remote and scrapping the whole thing.

When big name actors started voicing animated films it was sort of novel and cool. Now I long for the days when anonymous voices brought our favorite cartoon characters to life. I don't want to know what they look like. I don't want to spend the movie trying to place a familiar voice that I can't quite recognize, and most of all, I don't want to picture the likes of Jim Belushi and Glenn Close reading their lines in little sound booths. Every time Red spoke, all I could see was Anne Hathaway with that perpetually surprised look on her face mixing it up by talking through her teeth. A little mystery goes a long way in preserving movie magic, and Hoodwinked is just a little too hip for its own good.