Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil (PG) ★½

Not every CG-animated film need cost as much as Rio or Rango, but the blandly derivative Hoodwinked Too! Hood Vs. Evil is so palpably low-rent in every conceivable facet that I wondered if perhaps the version I saw was some kind of early rough cut, still awaiting its final layers of detail to be added by a team of CG technicians. If only.

A follow-up to 2006's Hoodwinked, a film I don't recall being so successful as to warrant a sequel ("successful," admittedly, being a subjective term), Hoodwinked Too is, like its predecessor, set in a world populated entirely by fairy tale characters. (Picture a less colorful, less amusing version of Shrek's Far Far Away.) The plot centers on Red Riding Hood (Hayden Panettiere, in a role abdicated by Anne Hathaway) and Wolf (Patrick Warburton), elite members of the Happily Ever After Agency, a sort of fairy tale Homeland Security, mounting a search-and-rescue mission to recover Red's Granny (Glenn Close) from the clutches of an evil witch (Joan Cusack) that has abducted her.

Rounding out Hoodwinked Too!'s voice cast is a veritable a laundry list of '80s and '90s comedy relics, including Cheech and Chong, Martin Short, Andy Dick, and Everybody Loves Raymond's Brad Garrett. The most recognizable voices from this decade are SNL B-teamers Amy Poehler and Bill Hader. The retro casting is somewhat apt, I suppose, considering that the film's animation looks as if it were rendered by a Pentium processor running Windows 95. And yet you'll still be expected to pay 2011 prices to see it, with an extra premium added for Steal-D, err, I mean Real-D viewings. Talk about getting hoodwinked.

Hollywood.com rated this film 1 1/2 stars.