Overall Rating
  Awesome: 17.61%
Worth A Look: 22.54%
Average: 28.87%
Pretty Bad: 18.31%
Total Crap: 12.68%
7 reviews, 100 user ratings
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| Chronicles of Riddick, The |
by Scott Weinberg
"Yet another promising genre filmmaker devoured by the Movie Machine..."
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I'm not exactly sure how the not-half-bad "Pitch Black" would yield such an overbaked and lumbering sequel like "The Chronicles of Riddick", a follow-up so goofy and muddled and dreary that it pretty much ignores everything that made the first installment such an underground hit on home video, but I'm certainly not surprised. Somebody over at Universal smelled Franchise Potential, and the result is a comic-booky Space Adventure so wooden and overwrought that it feels a whole lot like "Battlefield Earth Jr." - and that's something NO movie wants to be.I distinctly remember saying something in my Boiler Room review to the effect of "The gravel-throated Vin Diesel displays some real depth of character and delivers a fantastic supporting performance..." At that point, I considered the guy an underrated asset, a newcomer character actor who could pull off all sorts of gruff-minded theatrics.
Since Boiler Room, Mr. "Diesel" (oh, gimme a break already; the guy's name is Mark Vincent!) has headlined Pitch Black, The Fast and the Furious, XXX and A Man Apart. Not once in this quartet of cacophonous clattering did Mark Vincent do anything impressive. And by "impressive" I mean 'anything above and beyond grunting, punching, driving, shooting and sweating'. The guy's a full-bore one-note action star these days, so keep that Boiler Room DVD handy, as Diesel's performance within will one day prove to be a real rarity.
Also essentially sleepwalking through this mega-budget, mini-sensical space epic is writer / director David Twohy. This is a guy who got his start scripting Critters sequels before hitting the big-time with his work on The Fugitive. But counter that lofty credit with his screenplays for Terminal Velocity, Waterworld and Impostor...and you're looking at a guy who's made a misstep or three. As a director, his batting average is noticably more impressive: he's helmed the underrated The Arrival, Pitch Black and the criminally overlooked Below. Working with a massive budget for the first time in his career, Twohy is forced to go the Lowest Common Denominator route, and the result is something that only a hyper-caffeinated 12-year-old could truly love.
The Chronicles of Riddick is, and this should come as no surprise given its leading man and Summer Tentpole status, a loud and flashy and mindless affair. And there's nothing wrong with that. But unless Mr. Twohy & Co. were going for a piece of filmed entertainment that's as irrepressably silly as it is butt-twistingly dull, this one's got to count as a fairly resounding failure across the board. Even the most basic element of the Sci-Fi Action Epic (that would be the action) is mishandled so ineptly and so consistently that one wonders what the main selling point could possibly be.
Unintentional comedy is the only conceivable answer. Obviously any Space Opera that names an ultra-hot planet "Crematoria" is not aiming for high drama, but that doesn't mean that every "straight" line of dialogue should be met with peals of surprised giggles from audience members who clearly weren't expecting something so amusing.
The plot can be easily broken into three simple wedges: Act I sees our hulking anti-hero learn of his "Furian" lineage before he's asked to save a peaceful planet from destruction by the "Necromongers"; Act II has Riddick arrive at, and then escape from, an underground prison within the universe's sweatiest planet; Act III is when the Necromongers get theirs and how.
It ain't Shakespeare...but oddly Twohy seems to think it is. How else to explain the painfully languid subplot that feels like nothing more than a few hilariously dressed space-folk rehearsing their lines for an interstellar Macbeth revivial?
A host of truly gifted actors are left to crumble beneath layers of matte paintings, tinny set designs, clunky costumes and CGI paraphernalia. The excellent character actor Colm Feore is not only woefully miscast as Head Villain, but the actor all but vanishes beneath the artifice that surrounds him. Ditto poor Judi Dench, who briefly parades through her Obi-Wan Kenobi schtick to little effect. Thandie Newton and Karl Urban vamp it up mercilessly in a needless subplot that seems ported in from an episode of Star Trek: Voyager.
Clearly David Twohy intended for The Chronicles of Riddick to be a big, flashy, comic-booky affair, but the lure of Franchise Filmmaking at its Most Profitable seems to have dulled his genre-loving sensibilties. One hopes that The Chronicles of Riddick ends up as a big-time bomb, if only for the obvious fact that Twohy's a damn solid filmmaker...but only when he's forced to work within the constraints of an actual budget. If less is more, then more is The Chronicles of Riddick. Clearly 'more' does not always equal 'better'.As a longtime and passionate fan of all things action-heavy and outer-spacey, I actively wanted to like this movie. But between the endlessly goofball chit-chat, the all-but-incomprehensible action sequences and the painfully muffled acting performances, this loud, lethargic sequel is utterly Riddick-U-Less.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=10007&reviewer=128
originally posted: 06/11/04 16:03:12
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USA
11-Jun-2004 (PG-13)
DVD: 16-Nov-2004
UK
N/A
Australia
29-Jul-2004
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