Hoodwinked Too! Hood VS. Evil

Boy, is this movie bad. I could pull out my thesaurus and give you a hundred different words describing how awful Hoodwinked Too! Hood Vs. Evil is, but bad will do just fine. It’s bad in every conceivable way, on every merit a film can be judged. It’s a big, steaming pile of bad.

I suppose some slack can be cut for most of these dumbed-down animated movies that come around, since they are—at base—simply kids entertainment. Hoodwinked Too!, however, has nothing redeemable about it. Nothing clever or funny or neat. No, it’s just an endless marathon of dumb slapstick and dated pop-culture references, wrapped up in the kind of computer animation that’s more at home in a used-car-lot commercial.

The whole thing is an embarrassment, especially when one takes into account that four full-grown people—presumably with families and loved ones and hopes and dreams—wrote this stupid thing. What they’ve concocted is a plot that takes off from the first Hoodwinked!, taking the police procedural aspects of that movie and turning it into an adventure flick. The plot isn’t important—Granny (voiced by Glenn Close) has been kidnapped and Red Riding Hood (voiced by Hayden Panetierre) must save her—since it’s just an excuse to go from dumb gag to dumber gag, with a lot of boring and badly animated randomness in between.

The jokes are of the “What hath Shrek wrought?”-school of pop-culture references, except here we find no tact and even less relevance. It’s 2011 and these lazy bums are still making the same Goodfellas (1990) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991) references? At least have the salt to offend some people with a “Goodbye Horses” joke from the latter, for goodness sake.

Instead, the only thing to be offended is our intelligence. But that’s not the worst thing about this crappy movie. Instead, it’s the complete and total lack of effort put into it by anyone on any level, to the point it’s nearly offensive in its laziness. Rated PG for some mild rude humor, language and action.