Starring: Hayden Panettiere, Glenn Close, Patrick Warburton, Cheech and Chong, Bill Hader, Amy Poehler and Martin Short
Directed By: Mike Disa
Written By: Cory Edwards, Todd Edwards and Tony Leech
Produced By: Maurice Kanbar, David Lovegren and Joan Collins Carey
Distributor: The Weinstein Company
Rating: PG
Running Time: Approximately 85 minutes
Website: hoodwinkedtoomovie.com
Budget: $30 million
Genre: Animation
Release Date: April 29, 2011
If we’re being honest, the nation was not clamoring for a sequel to 2005’s Hoodwinked. The original movie, recasting Little Red Riding Hood as a sort of crime caper, followed the Shrek formula of taking fairy tale plots and infusing them with modern sensibilities and pop culture references. It starred a then-on-the-rise Anne Hathaway as the voice of Red, with Glenn Close as her extreme sports-loving Granny and Patrick Warburton as a Big Bad Wolf who was neither as Big nor as Bad as traditionally believed. Hoodwinked was a modest commercial and critical success, more noted for its roots as an independent animated production than its actual quality as a movie. If audiences could finally be rid of the exponentially diminishing returns of four Shrek movies, a follow-up to the creatively, commercially, and critically mediocre Hoodwinked seemed out of the question.
Delayed a year from its original scheduled release date comes Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil (which I award an extra half-star solely for the use of the little-used “Too” sequel suffix). Gone is Hathaway – on to greener pastures – and instead Red is voiced by Hayden Panettiere (TV’s “Heroes”). This time, Red is away from her detective agency employers (the Happily Ever After Agency, naturally) training with the mystical order of the Sisters of the Hood, a monk-like group of matronly bakers to which her Granny once belonged. Red is called back early, however, when an HEA mission goes awry. Rash actions by the Big Bad Wolf lead to a botched attempt to rescue Hansel and Gretel from a Witch, who not only escapes the HEA but does so with Red’s Granny as an extra hostage. Forced to work together despite their differences, Red and the Wolf track Granny and the Witch down, encountering along the way a lounge-singing harp (voiced by Wayne Newton, sounding strained and tired), a Giant that’s more a gangster than a beanstalk-dweller, and a host of other skewed fairy tale critters. Of course, the Witch (Joan Cusack) is not all she seems, and things get more complicated just as Red and the Big Bad Wolf decide that they don’t need each other to rescue Granny and the kids (spoiler: it turns out that they do).
Very little about Hoodwinked Too! rises above even the shaky standards of most kids’ movies. There are moments of occasional clever wordplay and amusing background vignettes, but for the most part the movie fails to live up to the potential of its “fairy tale crimes” premise. Hoodwinked Too! is overstuffed with characters, several of whom we’re lead to believe are beloved characters from the first film, though there’s little in their portrayals here to give a clue why we should be glad to see them. In the absence of real star power – what does it say when Jim Belushi, of all people, won’t return for your sequel? – a game cast of veteran voice actors do their best, though the material rarely provides them with much to work with; pity Glenn Close, forced into a gee-old-people-acting-young-sure-is-funny role as Granny. Yes, the word “jiggy” does come up, much to the delight of Will Smith and probably Will Smith alone. It’s indicative of the movie as a whole: lazy, ambitionless, and not quite clever enough to get by. In the absence of genuine zeal and wit, the anemic script is done no favors by the gawky animation and ugly character designs, compounded by unimpressive, tacked-on 3D effects.
As directed by seasoned animator Mike Disa, there’s nothing especially inept about Hoodwinked Too! One suspects that budget as much as anything has to do with the slapdash nature of the movie, but that’s the least of its problems. Shrek has the star power, Pixar has the heart, and both have the money in spades. Bereft of all those things, Hoodwinked Too! needed to show why its humor and its characters distinguished it from its more popular competitors. Instead, it’s a middling entry in a middling franchise where a few direct-to-video sequels are about as close to “happily ever after” as it’s going to get.
1.5 Stars
