Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil

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Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil
Oh muffins, even the title is TOO awful.
Genre: Family
Action
Comedy
Directed by: Mike Disa
Written by: Cory Edwards
Todd Edwards
Tony Leech
Starring: Hayden Panettiere
Glenn Close
Patrick Warburton
Photography: Color
Distributed by: Kanbar Entertainment
Kanbar Animation
Arc Productions
The Weinstein Company
Release date: April 23, 2011 (Tribeca Film Festival)
April 29, 2011 (United States)
Runtime: 87 minutes
Country: United States
Language: English
Budget: $30 million
Box office: $16 million
Prequel: Hoodwinked!

Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs Evil is a 2011 American computer-animated 3D family action comedy film and the sequel to 2005's Hoodwinked!, with most of the original cast reprising their roles except Anne Hathaway and Jim Belushi, who were replaced by Hayden Panettiere and Martin Short respectively.

Unlike the original Hoodwinked!, this film had a theatrical 3D release somehow. Despite this, many critics called this one of the worst films of 2011 and even one of the worst animated sequels of all time. The film was also a box office bomb, making barely more than half its budget.

Plot

While training with a mysterious covert ops group known as the Sisters of the Hood, Red (Hayden Panettiere) gets an urgent call from Nicky Flippers (David Ogden Stiers), head of the top-secret Happily Ever After Agency. A wicked witch named Verushka (Joan Cusack) has kidnapped Hansel (Bill Hader) and Gretel (Amy Poehler), and Red's the only one who can save them. Accompanied by the Big Bad Wolf (Patrick Warburton) and Wolf's pal, Twitchy (Cory Edwards), Red sets out to bring the children back.

Why It is Evil

  1. It almost takes away the entire tone of what made the first film so enjoyable and charming while staying true to the fairy tale it was based on. Here, it feels more like a mixture of a bad buddy cop/secret agent film.
    • Another example for why the lack of charm that the original film has is that most of the film takes place in a city, as opposed to a forest village like the first film, which takes away the charm the first film had.
  2. The film tries too hard to make it seem like a movie much more similar to Shrek and it continues to rip it off.
  3. While somewhat better than the first film, the CGI animation is weak and looks like a PS2 or GameCube game, which can be dated by the mid-2000s, since Starz/Arc Productions also animated Gnomeo and Juliet and The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything, A VeggieTales Movie (not to mention, the Andrew Brenner era of Thomas & Friends), both of which has better CGI animation and was made two months and 3 years prior to this film.
    • It's unbelievable that a 2011 CGI-animated movie like this has weak animation, considering that Rango, Rio, Kung Fu Panda 2, Cars 2, From Up on Poppy Hill, Happy Feet Two, The Adventures of Tintin, Puss in Boots and Arthur Christmas which all came out the same year as this film and has animation thirty times better than this.
  4. A few characters from the first film have gotten flanderized badly to the point of becoming unlikable and lacking the charm they previously have.
    • Red has changed from an action loving badass girl into a big cry baby with anger issues. Not to mention she looks totally different than she did in the previous film.
    • Twitchy's personality has changed very badly into the exact opposite of his original incarnation. In the first film, he talks super fast and is a goofball, which gives him a bit of charm. In this film, however, while he sounds the same, he talks more normally, is a lot smarter and more serious.
    • Kirk the Woodsman and Boingo feel like they've been thrown into the movie at the last minute and are only there for filler.
  5. On the subject of the characters, Kirk the Woodsman barely appears in the film and is shoe-horned in before the climax, this is also very jarring since he was one of the major characters in the previous film.
  6. Extremely weak story with extremely cheesy and cliché writing and dialogue that's been used in numerous better films.
  7. For the entire film and even in the trailers, we were to believe that Verushka was the main villain, but after Granny manages to escape the first time, out-of-complete nowhere, the plot twist is revealed that Hansel and Gretel are the real main villains. This feels incredibly rushed with no real build-up whatsoever.
    • Granted, the previous film did a very similar plot-twist with Boingo being the true main villain, but at here there was no OTHER main antagonist.
    • Also, the way they say the “You’ve been Hoodwinked!” line is very confusing and makes no sense as they make it sound like “Too” but they show it as “Two”. This also comes off as a forced fourth wall break and quite possibly the most egregious name drop in a movie.
  8. On that topic, Hansel and Gretel (while somewhat cute) can be a tad bit creepy - especially when they grin.
  9. Red and Kirk's new voice actors, Hayden Panettiere and Martin Short, barely sound like Anne Hathaway and Jim Belushi (Though not even Hathaway would be able to save this film, as she was part of a much better-animated film released in 2011).
  10. Weak final battle. Red and her friends defeat the giant Hansel and Gretel by... tricking them into eating too many truffles so that they get so big and fat that they can no longer move.
  11. The ending feels like it's been rushed and is nothing more than sequel-baiting for a third movie that (so far) will never see the light of day, because of this and the first movie's middling Metacritic scores.
  12. Lots of scenes that drag on, such as the characters talking too much or some close up of the characters' mouths.
    • Speaking of the characters' mouths, some of the lip-syncing is very off at times, mainly due to the weak animation.
  13. Stolen font. During the scene where Red is looking for the Dark Castle Towers, there is a store that uses a Disney font.
  14. Unfunny and completely unoriginal running gags and cheesy puns.
    • Japeth, the singing goat who serves as a minor character in the previous film, constantly getting hurt or nearly gets killed feels completely out of nowhere and unneeded as it has no purpose to the “plot” and it really never happened to him in the first film, so it just feels undeserving. To add insult or injury, Japeth nearly gets killed and ran over when the car Red, Wolf, and Twitchy ride comes straight at him at the very end of the film.
    • Almost every character says “Oh Muffins!”, in every scene which will get unfunny really fast.
    • Not only that but there's also disgusting gross-out humor which was rarely present in the original Hoodwinked!.
  15. Several models of characters from the first film are reused a lot in backgrounds.
  16. Much like FernGully 2: The Magical Rescue, there are barely any callbacks to the previous film and as such, feels more like a stand-alone movie, the only time they do a call back to said film is when they visit Boingo (the main villain from the previous film) in jail.
  17. It definitely killed the Hoodwinked! franchise, and coupled with the closing of The Weinstein Company in 2018, ended any chances for a third film.
  18. This film also started the downfall of The Weinstein Company
  19. The scene where Red encounters Moss the troll in the intro is way too scary for a kids movie.

Redeeming Qualities

  1. The voice acting is decent.
  2. While a bit flanderized, the characters are still likable from the last movie.
  3. There are a few funny moments here and there, such as "Do i amuse you? Am I some sort of clown to you?", and the scene where the Giant accidentally falls on Japeth, to which he says in an annoyed-like tone: "Boys, I seem to have landed on a singing Goat'''."
  4. Incredible soundtrack composed by Murray Gold. Particularly when Red jumps off the Moss's bridge, Red heading to stop Hansel and Gretel in the city, and Red, Wolf, and Twitchy ride the car at the end of the film.
  5. The CGI animation is even more decent and it's a big improvement over the first film as mentioned above. The characters do not move as stiffly as in the original movie and the lighting is much better.

Reception

Critical Response

Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil received much worse reviews than its prequel. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 11% based on 65 reviews, with an average rating of 3.4/10. The site's Critics Consensus reads: "It may add 3D to the original, but Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil is missing the first installment's wit and refreshingly low-budget charm." On Metacritic, it holds a weighted average score of 20 out of 100, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews." It also has an average rating of 4.7/10 on IMDb, much lower than the first film's 6.4/10.

Box Office

The movie was a critical and box office bomb, grossing $1.6 million and fell to Number 10 in its second weekend, declining 50.3%, and dropped out of theaters on its third weekend.

Videos

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