Riddick-ulous
My girlfriend and I went to a wedding in Rhode Island this past weekend. I have a bunch of friends in Massachusetts that I don’t get to see very often, so after the wedding, we stayed a few extra days and drove around the state visiting people. The person we ended up staying with owns a cat, to which both of us are allergic, and after a few days there we needed some non-catified air to breath. We slipped out a few hours before our flight and decided to go see a movie. The only thing playing we were remotely interested in was Riddick.
We probably would have been better served just driving to the airport and then hitting ourselves in the head with a brick, since television tells me that I’ll just be knocked out with no permanent damage and wake up at a dramatically appropriate time. I’m sure that you’ve read reviews that say Riddick is just a remake of Pitch Black. It’s not. It’s a remake of Pitch Black as written by the people that wrote Chronicles of Riddick.
I don’t want to go too over the top with how bad the film was. It was not Batman and Robin, and it was certainly better than Thinner. It was just a collection of things that probably seemed over the top cool on paper, but really were just ridiculous. The action tended to be like a fly-by-wire kung fu film without any of the style. I was honestly just bored through most of the film, which is the death knell for an action movie.
The plot is a clear rehash of Pitch Black. To be fair, they specifically talk about that IN the movie – they’re under no illusions. However, Pitch Black was successful because it was scary, and because you cared a little bit about the characters. Riddick gives you a pile of characters that you specifically don’t care about, as they are all terrible people. The one possible exception to this rule gets zero screen time, which is probably good because he seemed to be a piss poor actor. (That’s actually not true, he was fine in Warehouse 13, he just didn’t have anything to work with here). So, we have a collection of people that we don’t care about getting killed off in exactly the same way we are told to expect. I’m not really sure what is supposed to carry the dramatic tension of this movie. Vin Diesel I guess?
There are some good points in the movie. It’s actually quite interesting that the movie focuses far more on the bad guys than the protagonist. Riddick spends at least half the movie completely offscreen, lurking around and playing Escape from Butcher Bay. That’s a pretty bold move when the movie is CALLED Riddick. As Reuben put it, “It was like watching Predator, but this time you’re rooting for the Predator.” I kind of rooted for the Predator the first time, but whatever, I get the idea.
They also took the “one female character gets assaulted” trope and turned it on it’s head in a pleasing fashion. Katie Sackoff is always hilarious when she’s beating the shit out of people, and the director realized this and gave her some good opportunity. It seemed a little trite to make her gay, as I feel like that’s kind of a bullshit Hollywood go-to when you want to make a woman tough these days, and they at least stuck to their guns about it, not having Riddick “cure” her gayness.
The character of Johns is also not terrible. He’s not quite as two dimensional as the rest of the characters, and it was a good tie-back to the first film, as opposed to the rest of the obvious “this is a repeat of what happened ten years ago” references. He was probably twenty years too young to be the father of the Johns in Pitch Black, but it’s the future, I guess their T-virus is under control or something.
The real problem with both Chronicles and Riddick, though, is two-fold. First, Pitch Black worked so well because it was a bit closer to hard sci-fi than most. It’s about a shipwreck and some scary aliens, and that’s all they need to motivate the movie, the rest comes from humanity. Chronicles suddenly veers into Dungeons and Dragons territory with what is essentially magic swords and +2 Strength bonuses. Riddick maintains that same feel of being a Dragonlance or Forgotten Realms novel that somehow made it to the screen.
Second, the character of Riddick was great in the first movie because he was a supporting role, not the main character. When he becomes the main character, his motivations are suddenly much more clearly “good”, and he turns into a male power fantasy. He loses any fear the audience had of him, which immediately makes him less interesting. In Pitch Black, right up until the end, you were pretty sure he would gladly murder everyone else in the group to get away and never look back. In Chronicles and Riddick, you’re pretty sure he’s going to use his +5 Vorpal Sword of Keenness to cut the heads off of any bad guys or monsters and rescue the decent people. There’s nothing to carry tension or interest.
All in all, I’d have to encourage a pass on Riddick. Watch it on Netflix with your DnD group when it comes out on DVD, and call out the stats and moves of the characters on screen. Also, drink while doing it. That’s going to make it a lot more tolerable. Or better yet, just play Escape from Butcher Bay, ’cause that game is awesome.
