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.
 |
| 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.
