In Riddick, writer/director David Twohy and star Vin Diesel return to the formula that made Diesel’s first outing as the anti-hero Richard B. Riddick, Pitch Black, an enduring cult sci-fi favorite: scary planet, scary aliens, Riddick being a badass.
Their efforts are only partly successful. While Riddick features occasional fun moments, mostly showcasing the main character outsmarting and outwitting his would-be antagonists, the film is far too long and ponderous for those moments to carry things, and the film’s all-too-predictable resolution leaves you with only one possible rationale for the film being made: to facilitate yet another sequel.
This time out, the audience finds Riddick alone, wounded, and apparently stranded on a harsh, unnamed world where just about everything in the environment is lethal, betrayed by the Necromongers, the galactic conquerors he became the ruler of at the end of the previous film in the series, 2004’s The Chronicles of Riddick.
Things look pretty bleak for the one-time escaped convict, but Riddick takes his predicament as an opportunity to regain the edge he believes he lost during his time as the Necromongers’ Lord Marshal.
So he heals, he learns to survive the planet’s hostile critters, and he even adopts one as a pet. But he also learns that safely living on the planet for a prolonged period is not an option, and so with the help of a conveniently-situated emergency beacon, Riddick makes his presence known to the galaxy at large, knowing someone will be greedy and stupid enough to come try and get him, and thus provide him his escape.
In short order, two groups of mercenaries come looking to collect the sizable bounty on Riddick’s bald head. One group, a ragtag bunch led by Santana (Jordi Mollà) and Diaz (former WWE wrestler Dave Bautista), wants to simply cut off Riddick’s head and get paid (the bounty is doubled if Riddick is killed); the other group, uniformed, well-disciplined mercs under the command of Johns (Matt Nable) and Dahl (Katee Sackhoff), wants Riddick alive. Tension and territory claiming ensue, but it doesn’t take long for them all to realize what their quarry already knows — that as dangerous as Riddick is, the planet’s lifeforms are far deadlier, and they’ll all have to work together if they hope to survive and escape.
The primary reason why the first film in the series, 2000’s Pitch Black, remains so much more compelling and engaging than its subsequent sequels is that in that first film, Riddick was not the primary focal character of the story. He was the most memorable character, certainly, but it was actress Radha Mitchell, in her role as transport pilot Fry, that was the emotional core of Pitch Black, and it was her story and its resolution that carries the film from beginning to end. Diesel’s glowering, growling portrayal of Riddick, for all its testosterone-driven physicality and outrageous displays of badassery, is essentially static: he’s the same guy every time out. Fans of the series probably wouldn’t want him any other way, but for more discriminating audiences, there’s no development to his character. His experiences don’t change him — if anything, they harden his resolve to be a royal pain in the rear to the entire universe, and that’s just not very interesting after a while.
This time, in Riddick, Twohy, who also wrote and directed the previous film in the series and co-wrote Pitch Black along with writers Jim and Ken Wheat, would have audiences believe that Riddick has lost something he hopes to regain through an alien planet version of the “Cast Away” experience. But the script and Diesel never show us any appreciable change in the antihero’s character: he was a tough, scary guy at the beginning, and he’s a tough, scary guy at the end. Audiences are simply asked to believe that by the end Riddick is an even bigger badass than he was at the start, simply because he survived this planet and killed a few hardcase, well-armed mercs along the way. It doesn’t work.
Compounding this issue is the film’s ridiculous length. At almost two hours, Riddick is probably 40 minutes too long, and a great deal of that wasted time is spent focused on the stilted, manhood-measuring interactions between the two merc groups. Mollà’s Santana provides a fairly hissable villain, but his crew, even the gargantuan Batista, is otherwise forgettable. The other group, in particular Katee Sackhoff channeling the moxie of her most famous role, Starbuck on the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, is a bit more fun to watch, but in the end they’re all just potential fodder for either Riddick or the planet’s nasty, scorpion-like beasties. It almost feels like two separate films, neither of which would have been very good on their own, mashed together into one extra-long and still inferior film.
But the ending does leave the door open for more “Chronicles of Riddick”, so maybe Twohy and Diesel will get it right next time.
Score: 2 out of 5
Riddick
Starring Vin Diesel, Jordi Mollà, Matt Nable, Katee Sackhoff, Dave Bautista, Bokeem Woodbine, Raoul Trujillo, Nolan Gerard Funk, and Karl Urban. Written and directed by David Twohy.
Running Time: 119 minutes
Rated R for strong violence, language and some sexual content/nudity.