By Preston Wilder
This is junk food, but it has some tasty bits. The structure is intriguing, for a start, a three-act construction that might be described as White/Black/Gray: in Act 1 we see only Riddick, in Act 2 we don’t see him at all, in Act 3 he returns but now alongside other characters. The monsters are amusing, snake-scorpion hybrids with a mile-wide mean streak, and Riddick also bonds with a wild dog that later gets referred to as “some dingo-dango thing”. Then of course there’s the dialogue – much of it delivered in gravelly voice-over – adding frequent notes of portentous idiocy. To wit:
“The question ain’t what happened. The question is, what happened to me?” Actually, there is no such question. No-one cares what happened to Riddick – if only because hardly anyone remembers him. Richard B. Riddick first appeared in Pitch Black, where he was already a convict though I don’t recall what he’d done (that film came out in 2000). Four years later The Chronicles of Riddick tried to turn his story into a saga, but audiences mostly weren’t interested – and there it’s stayed for the past nine years, a sci-fi footnote hoping in vain for minor cult status. Riddick has a couple of flashbacks early on (mention is made of the ‘Necromongers’) but doesn’t really try to position itself as part of a franchise. It knows we have no idea what it’s talking about.
“Yet again, someone was trying to play me.” This too is false – because only one man could ever play Riddick, or indeed would want to. Vin Diesel is that man, and there’s no doubt that Riddick was made as a result of Mr. Diesel’s restored bankability due to Fast Five and Fast & Furious 6. Vin, with his lumpy doughy face and blank, if gentle, eyes (Riddick’s eyes glow in the dark), doesn’t have a great deal to offer, but there’s no doubt he fancies himself. Even the lesbian dominatrix played by Katee Sackhoff – she works for Johns (Matt Nable), one of two bounty hunters who converge on a remote planet trying to kill or capture Riddick – finally smiles and asks him nicely if he’d like to go “balls deep” in her (his words, not hers). No, she wasn’t a lesbian; she was just waiting for the right guy.
“He’s a convict, not some Zulu warlock.” So says one of the bounty hunters, speaking of Riddick – and you know this man will be dead in the next few minutes (he is), because of course Riddick isn’t just a convict, he’s a superman (and perhaps a Zulu warlock). At one point he walks towards the hunters in slo-mo, wearing his shades against the dust of the toxic yellow planet, and the hunters are duly rendered speechless. “I don’t believe it,” mutters one. “The balls on this f**kin’ guy!” marvels another. Earlier, two of the hunters are looking for their prey around a spaceship. “Remember,” warns one, “he could be anywhere!” – and the camera cranes up and there’s Riddick sitting calmly on the roof of the spaceship, eating peanuts or the outer-space equivalent.
“There are bad days, and then there are legendary bad days.” You really need Vin Diesel’s rumbling drawl for this one (he stretches out the first ‘bad’ to four times its natural length) – but it’s true, just like there are bad scenes and legendary bad scenes. The last act, alas, is bad, and brings the film down (119 minutes is way overlong for this kind of trifle): the monsters’ appearance feels arbitrary, the action is dull, you miss the verbal brawling of the middle section. The first half-hour comes close to being good – yet another tale of solo survival, something of a trend at the moment (see also Gravity, Life of Pi, and the Robert Redford-starring All is Lost). The scene where Riddick decapitates a villain despite having both arms in chains, however – he kicks the man’s machete up to the ceiling, kicks the man himself against the wall, catches the machete with his feet as it comes down then kicks it across the room, slicing off his head in bloody, 18-rated glory – is so bad it’s legendary.
“What do you want?” That’s Riddick in one of the flashbacks, talking to a guy named Vaako (bored viewers may prefer to think of them as Ridiculous and Vacuous). “Transcendence,” replies Vaako coolly – to which we can only respond: ‘Sorry, mate. You’re in the wrong movie!’.
“Somewhere along the way I missed a step. I got sloppy, dulled my own edge.” This may be true. Certainly, Riddick is never as gripping as it is early on, with our hero bloodied and alone on a hostile planet. He swats off a bat-like vulture trying to peck at his hand. He places his broken leg in a cleft between two rocks, and painfully un-breaks it. He hides from wild dogs in a lake, and gets nibbled by prehistoric fish. Best of all, there’s no dialogue (except the occasional voice-over). There’s a better, leaner B-movie buried within this bloated B-movie. Still, it has its moments.
DIRECTED BY David Twohy
STARRING Vin Diesel, Jordi Molla, Matt Nable
US 2013 119 mins
