RIDDICK
**
DIRECTED BY David Twohy
STARS Vin Diesel, Matt Nable
A step up from the 2004 slumber party The Chronicles of Riddick but still a few rungs down the ladder from 2000’s pitch-perfect Pitch Black, Riddick, the third theatrical endeavor featuring everyone’s favorite killer with a heart of gold, foregoes the disastrous epic scope of that middle movie and attempts to return to the more fleet-footed thrills of the original.
Vin Diesel reprises his role as Riddick, once again stranded on a desolate planet teeming with hostile creatures. He manages to domesticate a canine-like critter — it appears that, even in space, a dog is man’s best friend — but otherwise has his hands full warding off monstrous eel-scorpion thingies. In order to get off this rock, he activates a beacon so that mercenaries may come and find him — at which point he plans to steal one of their ships and vacate the premises. Two vessels do arrive, one commandeered by the vicious Santana (Jordi Mollà), the other captained by Boss Johns (Matt Nable), the father of Cole Hauser’s cowardly (and deceased) merc from Pitch Black.
With the arrival of these additional characters, the film turns into a slog, with Riddick playing feeble cat-and-mouse games with the hopelessly outmatched mercenaries. Battlestar Galactica‘s Katee Sackhoff has a sizable supporting role as Johns’ second-in-command, a hardcore lesbian who nevertheless warms up to Riddick after he suggests she allow him to go “balls deep” in her, while Mollà (Bad Boys II, Elizabeth: The Golden Age) delivers another awful performance in an English-language film (this Barcelona-born actor has won several awards for his work back in Spain, so clearly something is getting lost in translation). The final half-hour is basically a reprise of Pitch Black, only lacking in characters we care about (Radha Mitchell and Keith David are sorely missed here) as well as deficient in any real suspense.
Given the sorry sequels, it seems Riddick as a character should have been a one-and-done deal. But don’t shed a tear if Diesel can’t find funding for any more films in the series — with a seventh Fast & Furious title now in production and a xXx sequel waiting in the wings, the actor will still be able to draw from other wells.
This article appears in Sep 11-17, 2013.
I’m not sure you should be critiquing movies. If all you are going to do is point out what you like and dislike, you have missed your calling by far. You need to learn to think about what others like, not yourself. Your opinion is completely worthless to the rest of humanity, it is what they will think that matters, and ultimately your recommendation needs to be based on what you think others will think about it. Everything else is a lie.
Having said that, I though Pitch Black was awesome, I though Chronicles of Riddick was fucking amazing, it is one of my favorite movies, and I liked this one a lot, as well. I can see why people wouldn’t like them, but for me, they hit the spot. If you can not see why people liked them (especially Chronicles of Riddick, what an epic!) then I don’t think you understand people very well, and that means that your writings and ratings become worthless.
Thanks for writing, Benjamin. I’ve only been doing this for over 25 years, but I will seriously weigh your opinion that I should immediately switch careers.
If you believe that all a critic should do is attempt to guess what others will think of a movie, then your interpretation of the job couldn’t be more wrong. At any rate, RIDDICK has a mediocre 57% on Rotten Tomatoes from audiences (not critics), so I would say that my opinion is nevertheless closer than yours to “the rest of humanity.”
(“Chronicles of Riddick was fucking amazing, it is one of my favorite movies” — heh heh, I’ll be chuckling over that one for some time.)
Cheers!
If 57% of audiences (not critics) liked it… then more than half liked it. How does that make your opnion closer than his?
I liked a lot about the movie, but honestly never saw Pitch Black so I may have to rent that. While liking it … I will admit that the movie wandered around a bit and lacked cohesion.
Hi, Bob. You have to go by the Rotten Tomatoes scale. A 57% on that site is deemed Rotten. Benjamin said he “liked this one a lot,” which denotes the equivalent of a pretty high Fresh rating.
And definitely rent PITCH BLACK; it’s far and away the best of the three.