The statute of limitations for long-awaited—but not
necessarily strongly desired—sequels has been tested with “Riddick”, the third
film in the pulp sci-fi trilogy that help put actor Vin Diesel on the map. With
four years between “Pitch Black” (2000) and “The Chronicles of Riddick” (2004),
and another nine before now, “Riddick” has more to live up to than just
satisfying the tropes and trappings of its predecessors. Now it must remind the
fans why they cared in the first place, while at the same time enticing the
non-initiated, Miley Cyrus generation.
Despite a promising first act, and a consistent lead performance from the
stoically masculine Vin Diesel, this lazily titled offering suffers greatly
from junior-slump.
The story
picks up right where the “Chronicles of Riddick” left off. The Necromongers, a
ruthless space-cult that has been living under Riddick’s rule after he managed
to slay their leader in a ritualistic battle, winning their throne by religious
default (Seriously, did you remember any this?), figures out how to banish
Riddick to a barren desert-planet, tricking him into thinking it’s his alien
home-world, Furia. Not-Furia, resembles a pulpy Martian landscape, filled with
dangerous creatures like elongated Tanzanian-tiger-jackals, and poisonous,
frog-shaped, dino-scorpions. Riddick learns how to live and survive on this
planet without tools or weapons, hoping for a chance to find a way back to
civilization.
Eventually
hope comes in the form of a couple of mini-crafts filled with mercenaries and
space-swat, on a bounty hunt for our hero.
One of these crews contains rough-rider, mad-maxish types like wrestler turned
(surprisingly capable) actor Dave Bautista and Spanish actor Jordi Malla, who
manages to deliver each line of his dialogue in a way that reeks of
screen-grabbing desperation and total incompetence at the same time. The second
ship includes Matt Nable as the father of a character you will have completely forgotten
from the first film and “Battlestar Galactica” actress Katy Sackhoff, as a strong
female, lesbian character; a gesture that
would have been bravely progressive if the film didn’t have to remind us that
she is both female and a lesbian every chance it had, by having two of the
male characters, including our hero, threaten to rape her, and by showing her
nude for basically no reason.
Once
the ‘plot’ begins and Riddick is ghosting from ship to ship trying to steal,
hide, and protect giant batteries and hordes of those poisonous space-frogs
come back into the picture, this movie completely loses whatever narrative
traction it started out with.
Though ultimately buried in bad acting and
poor plotting, the survivalist, space-Conan stuff at the beginning is actually
pretty cool. But instead the film decides to re-tread the creature-feature
tropes of the much-better executed “Pitch Black”—which in and of itself was
re-tread of the “Alien” franchise.
However,
this film isn’t without its selling points. Depending on how geeky you are, you
could enjoy the fact that it doesn’t seem to care at all if anybody recalls the
minutia of the previous two chapters of this franchise. This movie is steeped in the Riddick
mythology and if you were expecting a soft-reboot to ease you back in, you may
be confused and bewildered. And good for it that it refuses to fill the
audience in on its distinctly weird world and its idiosyncratic sci-fi rules
and widgets.
I wanted to fully enjoy this movie but I can’t say
that I did entirely. I enjoyed the creative creature designs and the graceful
simplicity of its first forty minutes. I did not enjoy the member-measuring,
macho, plot-grafting of the second act, or the too-little- too-late monster
mayhem at the end of the film. I left “Riddick” disappointed and frustrated,
not only because so much of it was bad, but because it had started out so good.
Grade: D+
Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Sep-2013
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