The opening half-hour, which relies heavily on the story's unusual characterizations as well as on some finely salted dialogue, promises more than the rest of the picture can deliver. Milton's assisted in his efforts by a tough beauty named Piper (Amber Heard) and pursued by Lucifer's most accomplished tracker, known simply as "The Accountant" (William Fichtner). Despite its high-gloss 3-D presentation, Drive Angry is the most obvious example of his commitment, given its penchant for fast cars, hot women and bloody violence.īut whereas the recent Machete managed to both pay homage to its celluloid ancestors while emerging as an entertaining movie in its own right, this one ultimately proves to be a drag, getting off to a gleeful start before losing its way.Īs if he didn't learn his lesson from Ghost Rider, Cage again plays a character who's a literal hellraiser - here, he's Milton (presumably a nod to Paradise Lost scribe John Milton), who escapes Satan's lair to return to Earth for the sole purpose of saving his granddaughter from a murderous cult led by Jonah King (Billy Burke, aka Bella's dad in Twilight). Nicolas Cage's hilarious, split-second cameo as Fu Manchu in Grindhouse's Werewolf Women of the SS faux trailer must have whetted the actor's appetite for headlining feature-length throwbacks to the disreputable fare of yore, as evidenced by many of the movies he's accepted over the last few years. After all, it's hard to bury oneself in the picture's moody period setting when the central thrust remains that Valerie basically has to choose between Justin Bieber and a Jonas Brother. The teen angst that Hardwicke brought to the original Twilight (still the best film in that series) was appropriate, but here, it creates a modernity that's at odds with the rest of the film. Instead, the focus is on the love triangle between Valerie and the village's two cutest boys, the smoldering Peter (Shiloh Fernandez) and the simpering Henry (Max Irons). Had Hardwicke and scripter David Johnson buried themselves in the lore and atmosphere of their setting while accentuating the legend's leaps into sensuality, violence and the allure of latent desires, it could have worked beautifully. A visiting moral crusader (Gary Oldman, in camp mode) reveals that the wolfman is actually someone from the village, and this causes everyone to view their neighbors with suspicion and - shades of The Crucible - hurl accusations of witchcraft. A well-cast Amanda Seyfried plays Valerie, a young medieval maiden whose village has long been plagued by the presence of a werewolf.
Unfortunately, it botches the assignment, resulting in a film that proves to be rather toothless.Ĭatherine Hardwicke's status as the director of Thirteen is a plus, but she's also the helmer of the first Twilight picture, and it's the overriding influence of that blockbuster that damages this film. These angles have been tackled before (the Peter Cushing vehicle The Beast Must Die and Neil Jordan's mesmerizing The Company of Wolves, respectively), but Red Riding Hood initially promises that it will ambitiously tackle the lycanthrope tale on both fronts. The idea of combining a werewolf tale with a whodunit is an interesting one, and the notion of adding layers of Freud and feminism onto the wolfman saga is positively genius.