'You probably think you know the story," says the sardonic voiceover at the start of Hoodwinked, as we see a leather-bound volume of classic fairy tales lying open at the legend of Little Red Riding Hood. The movie then dresses up this old granny of a fable in the vulpine comedy of post-Shrek, multilayered family entertainment, tailored to an audience fully aware that the word "hood" denotes not only a type of head-covering but also urban territory disputed by gangs.

In this animated retelling, released on Friday, young Red turns out to be a tough, sussed type whose first words to the wolf are: "You again? What do I have to do? Get a restraining order?" The film's poster pastiches The Usual Suspects, and this hints at a narrative in which visual and verbal clues consistently mislead. None of the central characters - Red, Granny, the Wolf, the Woodsman - fulfils the same purpose as in the traditional nursery version, and the narrative variously sends up the James Bond and Mission: Impossible franchises, the TV series CSI, and even the genre of computer-generated kidult movies itself. After a reversal, the heroine mooches around while a Randy Newman-ish ballad called Red Is Blue oozes on the soundtrack.

However, for audiences truly to be surprised by this vision of the girl in the 'hood, they would need to have avoided the strikingly numerous modernisations of the Little Red Riding Hood story that have already been attempted in print and on film.