Three stars. Rating: R, for strong violence, profanity, sexual candor and occasional nudity
By Derrick Bang
Richard B. Riddick is the Timex
watch of action antiheroes: No matter how bone-crunching the licking, he keeps
on ticking.
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| Armed with no more than a large bone club, Riddick (Vin Diesel) attempts to survive his encounter with a particularly large "mud demon." This creature is between him and access to a safer part of this wayward planet, so Riddick is determined to win this little skirmish. Rest assured, though: This won't be the last he sees of mud demons. |
You’ve got to admire a guy who
can survive a fall of several hundred feet (perhaps even more) while getting
buried beneath a massive rock avalanche ... with no more than some cuts,
bruises and a leg fracture that he sets himself, by jamming metal pins into the
surrounding muscle.
Granted, this character’s otherwise
cartoonish invulnerability is made almost palatable by Vin Diesel’s growling,
glowering performance; one can imagine Riddick is fueled by ’tude alone. Bottle
the stuff, and he’d made a fortune selling it to up-and-coming action hero
wannabes.
Diesel follows in the
well-stomped footsteps of earlier strong, monosyllabic types played by
Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger; like them, Diesel has made a
virtue of his limited acting range. He’s a dour teddy bear on steroids: an
apparent bad guy — introduced, back in 2000’s Pitch Black, as a “notorious convict” — who nonetheless respects
honor, reluctantly protects the weak and disenfranchised, and turns into a
coldly efficient predator only when dealing with Those Who Deserve It.
Even when chained and
(apparently) helpless, Riddick can issue threats with a layer of menace that
Diesel sells quite persuasively.
Like I said, you gotta admire the
guy.
Riddick has become an intriguing
franchise for Diesel and writer/director David Twohy. Following Pitch Black — which Twohy scripted from
a story by Jim and Ken Wheat — they re-teamed for 2004’s The Chronicles of Riddick and, that same year, an animated short
called Dark Fury (Diesel voicing his
character, Twohy supplying the story). But Chronicles
was an overblown box-office bomb, its complicated narrative adding far too much
extraneous stuff to the first film’s
plain-vanilla, survive-the-threat template.
No surprise, then, that Twohy has
gone back to basics with this new film, which sports the appropriately simple
title of Riddick. Wisely dumping the
second film’s Egyptian-esque, Necromonger intrigue that felt swiped from 1994’s
Stargate, Twohy gives us the same
basic, one-against-impossible-odds story that made Pitch Black such a nifty little B-thriller.
Indeed, at times the echoes of Pitch Black are so loud, that this “new”
film almost could be considered a remake.
Once again stuck on a godforsaken
little planet in the middle of celestial nowhere, Riddick calls on his impressive
survival skills to endure. How he winds up on this sun-scorched world is
detailed in a needlessly obtuse and frankly stupid flashback: some clumsy
exposition that Twohy attempts to improve with Diesel’s off-camera narration (a
device employed only during these early scenes).
Twohy’s subsequent story divides
neatly into three distinct chapters, the first an all but dialogueless
depiction of Riddick’s efforts to master his barren surroundings. This act is compelling
in a Robinson Crusoe-esque manner, with Riddick slowly gauging the relative
degree of danger presented by the planet’s primary predators: a nasty little
winged carrion feeder, easily kept at bay; a jackal-like canine, definitely
hazardous in hunting packs; and a truly wicked, razor-tailed “mud demon”
confined to pools in darkened caves.
The latter has a nasty
two-pronged attack, with both poisonous fangs and its slashing tail.
Twohy put some thought into this
barren world’s ecology, and he deserves credit for the effort.
Having built himself back up to
fighting strength — a process that takes months, based on the canine companion
that he trains from puppyhood (another nice touch) — Riddick ventures further
afield and finds an unstaffed mercenary resource station. He activates the interior
emergency beacon, allowing it to scan him, knowing full well that bounty-hungry
mercenaries will arrive quickly, eager to catch him for the reward.
Riddick’s plan works: Cue Act II,
and the arrival of a ship filled with lethal killers led by a machete-wielding
sadist named Santana (Jordi Mollà). His gang is followed, in short order, by a
second craft captained by Boss Johns (Matt Nable) and his kick-ass
second-in-command, a Nordic sniper named Dahl (Katee Sackhoff).
Followers of Riddick’s earlier
escapades will recognize the name Johns, and indeed Boss turns out to be the
father of William Johns, the weasel bounty hunter played by Cole Hauser, who
met a well-deserved end back in Pitch
Black. Boss Johns now has serious issues with Riddick, but Santana isn’t
about to let anybody else horn in on his
action.
The two rival merc groups
therefore establish an uneasy alliance, with Boss Johns and his group politely waiting
for the moment when Santana asks for
help ... a moment that Johns knows will arrive, because Riddick is far more
resourceful than Santana appreciates.
This middle portion is Twohy’s
strongest act, with the seemingly omniscient Riddick — helped by his
four-legged “pet” — playing on group paranoia and tweaking the mercs at every
turn. By far the most suspenseful scene involves Santana and a booby-trapped
storage locker that Riddick might have tampered with: a deliciously harrowing
interlude that Twohy and editor Tracy Adams milk for maximum tension.
Loyalties and alliances shift
again with the arrival of Act III, when all hell breaks loose. Thanks to a
massive, region-wide rainstorm that churns the arid desert sand into puddles
and rivulets, the fearsome mud demons are granted wide-ranging mobility the
moment night falls: a serious problem for everybody except Riddick, thanks to his
spooky, night-vision-enhanced eyes.
And, just that quickly, we’re
re-playing the final act from Pitch Black.
Not necessarily a bad thing, but — if this film revives the franchise — I hope
Twohy comes up with something more original next time.
Mollà is appropriately vicious as
Santana, the sort of cheerful sadist who probably tossed kittens into a
microwave when he was a kid. We get his measure early on, when he kills a
female captive for sport (Keri Lynn Hilson, in an eyeblink role); right then,
as Riddick watches this act through Diesel’s hardened gaze, we know that
Santana isn’t destined to die of old age.
Nable overacts atrociously as
Boss Johns, emoting toward the back balcony with a saliva-sputtering fury that
works against his introduction as an ultra-cool mercenary. Former WWE world
champion and mixed martial-arts grappler Dave Bautista is much more
persuasively powerful as Diaz, the guy who keeps Santana’s crew in line.
Nolan Gerard Funk has a weird
supporting role as Luna, the youngest member of Santana’s crew, whose
Bible-spouting piety is a plot affectation that feels and sounds like it
wandered in from some other film. We sympathize with Luna because of his youth,
and suspect that he’s probably a decent fellow at heart, but that makes his
presence even stranger; I cannot imagine somebody like Santana putting up with
this young man’s behavior, even if he is
regarded as a “lucky charm.”
All of which brings us to
Sackhoff, who as Dahl — a name chosen specifically for its sound-alike term of ridicule
— gets to be even more of a bad-ass than she was as Starbuck, during five
seasons of television’s Battlestar
Galactica ... which means she busts heads, cusses like a sailor and bares
her chest (the latter quite pointlessly, I’m obliged to mention). Sackhoff obviously
has a great time with the role, particularly each time Dahl makes an example of
Santana, and the actress is buff enough to make her smackdowns reasonably
credible.
But this is Diesel’s show, and he
holds our attention quite effectively, bringing these proceedings more dramatic
heft than they deserve. There’s no denying Diesel’s presence, and his aura of
latent menace; on top of that, it’s a hoot to watch him outfox and out-think
all these tough-talking thugs (the balance of whom don’t get enough screen time
to be distinguished from each another).
Graeme Revell delivers a
serviceable score: all mood, without any noticeably defining themes.
Cinematographer David Eggby conveys this planet’s grim surroundings, at times
granting us a sense of the shimmering heat, and he also has fun depicting what
Riddick “sees” through his unusual eyes.
At 119 minutes, though, Riddick wears out its welcome; Twohy
takes much too long to build to the climax, which then lingers past the point
of diminishing returns. I’m also dismayed by his reliance on the gory deaths
that fans have made de rigueur in
this post-Saw era; has it really
become necessary to sink to such slaughterhouse excess?
And that, ultimately, is the
major problem with this newest chronicle of Riddick: Despite all of Diesel’s
droll sneaking around and predatory skill, nothing in this film delivers the
emotional wallop we got at the end of Pitch
Black. Twohy may know how to direct Riddick’s action-packed adventures, but
we need a stronger writer at the keyboard.
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