Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974 (2009)

I decided to post just for this first movie rather than for the whole trilogy because (at least with the first two, I haven’t seen the third yet) the same criticism applies overall.

This’ll be a short, quick post, mostly to ask a question:

Should great acting and a good pitch redeem a script full of clichés?  We’ve got the young, naive go-getter reporter and the older, wiser coworker, the angry boss and everyone under the thumb of the villain (including the police force, newspapers), the list goes on and on… I literally scoffed at the “going through old articles” montage, the “hanging maps with pins and sharpied circles” moment.  I get that there are only so many ways to get these ideas across, but I’d really rather just watch Zodiac again.  At least there the puppyfaced hero is a cartoonist.

Sean Bean’s grand evil motivation is to bulldoze a gypsy camp and build a mall.  I can’t help but be reminded of Judge Doom in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and that’s about how seriously I can take it.  Frankly this side plot serves no purpose, at least so far.  It’s odd how much they struggle to make this a point when in reality all we care about are the murdered girls which, to him, are a side note.  Maybe the two will tie together more cohesively by the third movie?  I hope so.

The best part of 1974, by far, was the ending.  All the predictable set-up was thrown out the window and in one scene our hero defies expectations and grows some genuine character.  Without giving too much away, he acts as a man of his age and emotional state might actually act, which was a refreshing surprise.

A close second redeeming factor is how it was shot.  The style and cinematography were pretty cool, it certainly wasn’t boring to look at.

I wanted to like it.  In fact, I sort of do like it when I don’t think about it too much.   Too bad thinking about movies is what I do.

5/10