The Chronicles Of Riddick
Written and Directed by: David Twohy
Starring: Vin Diesel, Judi Dench, Colm Feore, Thandie Newton, Karl Urban, Alexa Davalos

It may have been The Fast And The Furious and XXX that made Vin Diesel a household name, but it was Pitch Black in 2000 that really launched his career. As the escaped convict Richard B. Riddick, Diesel was cast as the classic anti-hero in a movie that was high on suspense but relatively low on story. Although it didn’t do so well at the box office, its sizeable take on home video and DVD has given writer/director David Twohy another chance years later to fill in all of the story that was missing in the first place. And that’s exactly what The Chronicles Of Riddick is — a sequel that Twohy has long been wanted to do, set 5 years after the events of Pitch Black. Of course, I’m sure it’s also a sequel that Vin Diesel has been wanting to do, as his D&D role-playing geek side seems to embrace this character a lot more enthusiastically than anything else he’s done.

The strange thing is that you wouldn’t know that The Chronicles Of Riddick was the sequel to Pitch Black just by looking at it. In almost every possible way they are completely different movies. Most importantly, the budgets are almost 100 million dollars apart. The Chronicles Of Riddick is a heavily effects driven movie, to the point where it feels like Star Wars or even the upcoming Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow — almost everything except the actors is computer generated. Thankfully, the quality of the visual effects manage to keep pace with the ambitious world that Twohy has imagined most of the time. (The rest of the time it looks like a giant video game.) Although the film’s colour pallette is limited to black, grey and rusty orange, there is some really cool and impressive eye candy here. In some ways this reminds me of the kind of movie you might have seen made back in the 80’s, with pretty imaginative and sometimes plain weird imagery. The action and fight sequences are okay too; they did a good job of coming up with something original that doesn’t completely rip-off the Matrix and the whole martial arts trend. Some of the action scenes suffer too much from “shaky camera syndrome” however. “Well it kind of looks like he’s kicking ass… I can’t really tell but I’ll just assume he is.” Still, for the art design and effects alone, the movie is at least halfway decent.

Of course, I say halfway decent because the other half of this movie is pretty damn cheesy. The complex story and backdrop that they’ve come up with for a character as simple as Riddick is a little overwhelming. Don’t try to comprehend it all though, you’ll just get a headache. The plot is nonsensical if not non-existent. What basic concepts I did grasp involved a group called The Necromongers, a race similar to The Borg (although they aren’t machines) trying to convert everyone in their path to their way of life… or kill them. The fascism undertones are obvious and overbearing, but there isn’t anything deeper than that at work. Riddick is part of a warrior race called the Furions, one of which has been prophesized to save the world and bring down the Necromongers. Of course, unlike most epic fantasy/sci-fi sagas, this prophecy is only 30 years old. Come on, you can do better than that!

Dame Judy Dench plays an air elemental named Aereon who really has no function in the movie other than to fade in and out of visibility and narrate. Karl Urban (Eomer from Lord of the Rings) plays Vaako, lieutenant to the Necromonger Lord Marshall, and in doing so gives us an absolutely pitiful Hugo Weaving/Agent Smith impression. Lady Vaako (Thandie Newton, Mission Impossible 2) is essentially a Necromonger version of Lady MacBeth, pushing Vaako to claim power from the Lord Marshall when the time is right.

When it comes down to it, these people are all pretty much irrelevant because this is Vin Diesel’s movie and we all know it. As Riddick, he is gruff and tough and a man of few words. Of course, when he does speak he usually has some tremendously bad one-liners to spout off. Believe me when I say there is a scene where he casually tells a guy that he can kill him with his tea cup, and then proceeds to impale him on it. Much of his bad ass dialogue comes across even better while he is wearing those goofy-looking goggles that protect his sensitive eyes from light. With the whole stylish, futuristic computer-generated universe they came up with, you’d think they could come up with something a little more hip for him to wear.

Although Diesel’s monotone delivery and overly dramatic timing make it hard to take everything seriously, they did also endear me to the movie a little more. I have to say that despite all the bad buzz around The Chronicles Of Riddick I do mildly recommend it. Go for the visuals and art design, stay for the cheesy dialogue, that’s what I say. I think it had potential to be a genuinely good fantasy/sci-fi movie if they hadn’t tried to tie it together with Pitch Black and the Riddick character… but then I guess they’d have to come up with a whole other story that’s just as ridiculous and confusing, and that doesn’t sound worth the effort. So I guess I’ll just take this for what it is, a big funny popcorn flick starring Vin Diesel. And you should too. — Sean