1728. Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil (2011)

Starring: Hayden Panettiere, Glenn Close, Patrick Warburton

Director: Mike Disa

Running Time: 87 mins

Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil is an American film and the sequel to Hoodwinked! After Granny is kidnapped by the same witch holding young Hansel and Gretel hostage, Red, Wolf and Twitchy all set out to save her and the children.

I’ve always found the original Hoodwinked one of the most surprisingly hilarious movies of the last few years. Its animation may be utterly shocking, but with its excellent script and sense of humour, it’s always been a really entertaining and quirky movie for me. That isn’t the case with Hoodwinked Too. With a script that’s way too lazy in replicating the comedic style of the original, a somehow worse animation style, and a generally dull story, it’s just not the weird parody of the fairytale genre and pop culture that it wants to be.

Let’s start off with the why the humour doesn’t quite work as well here as it did last time out. Hoodwinked was very much like Shrek in the way that it parodied the fairytale genre, bringing real-world concepts like police forces and extreme sports tournaments into the supposedly quaint world of the countryside.

Along with turning fairytale legends like Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf completely upside down, and its ingenious pop culture references that went as far as mimicking films like Pulp Fiction throughout, there was so much going on in the original.

Here, however, the film really loses a lot of the comedic ingenuity that made the original so entertaining. Above all, the change of setting from the fairytale countryside to the big city, and moving away from directly parodying a story like Red Riding Hood that we all know, Hoodwinked Too immediately loses a lot of its comedic potential.

Along with that, the pop culture references are a little too heavy this time, with the script is more content with just throwing in a direct quote from another random movie than a cleverly-crafted build-up to a reference, or even running references throughout the story, again heavily impacting on how fresh and clever the comedy feels in this movie, all of which led to me not really laughing that much here.

When it comes to the story, it’s not all that great either. Although it’s not particularly bad, it’s a lot less interesting (and even unpredictable) as the original movie, with a fairly standard rescue story that doesn’t inspire much. Its take on Hansel and Gretel is pretty entertaining, although it loses that spark a little towards the end as well, but in general, the plot here isn’t much to rave about.

Finally, we come to the animation. Now, the animation style of the original Hoodwinked is really poor, looking more like a cutscene from an early 2000s video game than a Hollywood movie, but the strong comedy and script have always managed to make that a small issue for the film, and maybe even allowed it to become a good quirk of the movie.

Somehow, though, the animation here, 6 years after the original, is even worse. I’m glad that the film doesn’t go for anything too different to the original, but I can’t understand why the character animation looks even less fluid and refined than the work before, and because the story and comedy are that much poorer, it’s something that can really get on your nerves throughout.

Overall, I was very disappointed by Hoodwinked Too. A far cry from the comedic genius of the original, and featuring a dull story as well as worse animation, it won’t inspire much enjoyment at all, and although it has a few moments of decent humour, it’s a generally unfunny and uninteresting affair, which is why I’m giving it a 6.2.