Riddick Review | Sci-Fi Sequel Is Thoroughly Riddick-ulous

Orlando Lens
By Nicholas Ware

The fall movie season has come. The period from Labor Day until Halloween tends to be a bit of a dumping ground for Hollywood cast-offs, cheapies, and not-quite-tentpoles. Riddick, the second sequel to 2000's Pitch Black, is the latest. The Riddick movies so far have not been quite the box office smashes that all involved may have hoped them to be. Vin Diesel is heavily invested in the series--a game studio he owns made two spin-off video games with the Riddick character--and it is largely through his efforts and his rebounding bankability after two huge Fast and Furious sequels that this new film comes to us. Despite Diesel's resurgence, the first weekend in September is hardly prime real estate on the Hollywood calendar. But it's also not a huge risk. The film to which Riddick is a direct sequel, The Chronicles of Riddick, cost $105 million to produce and only recouped about $60 million of that at the domestic box office. It eventually eked out profitability on home video, but it is likely through a much more modest budget--a reported $38 million for the new film--that the two-pack becomes a trilogy. Additionally, the seven years since The Chronicles of Riddick was released means that audiences are also relatively forgiving of the character after the previous film was critically panned. Riddick rehashes elements of both its predecessors and wraps the entire package up with a healthy dose of sci-fi silliness. It has all the elements to satisfy the likely limited fans of the character. However, it misses the mark on being memorable.


The first two Riddick movies both attempted to be hybrids. Pitch Black was sci-fi horror, not quite in the vein of Alien but sharing some DNA. The Chronicles of Riddick was sci-fi fantasy, nearly space opera. Riddick, instead of doing something interesting, tries to be a mix of both. The first half of the film is similar to an escaped slave narrative from a gladiator film, where the weak character--in this case an injured and stranded Riddick--finds an iron will and sharpens his survival and martial skills against the wilds. This part of the film feels very Conan the Barbarian. The second half of the film is a direct reference to Pitch Black, literally; part of the plot is that a character whose son died in Pitch Black must redeem himself by essentially going through the same ordeal. Riddick treads on familiar territory. What would have been interesting and could have been interesting is if the hybrid genre experiments kept going. I like to imagine a version of Riddick as a sci-fi western, with Riddick as a man-with-no-name type on a backwoods frontier planet. Or Riddick as a sci-fi cops-and-robbers flick, with Riddick on the run from space law. The possibilities were endless, and ignored. Instead, Riddick takes the easiest cues from its preceding films and tries to spice things up with liberal CGI, a genuinely enjoyable dog-master relationship, and some extremely crazy gore.

The embrace of the R rating is what really sets Riddick apart from Chronicles. Chronicles had much more riding on it financially, so a teen-friendly PG-13 was a must. Riddick eschews that route and delivers gratuitous lady-breasts (and Diesel-chest) and a particularly gruesome semi-decapitation as well as plenty of other spurting kills. However, the deaths mean nothing as the entire cast of characters is hard to care about. Riddick himself is a sociopathic loner who spends a 20-minute section of the film as a homocidal bump in the night stalking some bounty hunters. The bounty hunters are the only other human characters of note, and aside from one commander character and the token female (a professed lesbian who, in the film's most vomitous moment, Riddick converts to hetero through sheer force of teenage power fantasy), they are nearly all fodder without any interior lives of their own. They are there to be killed by or saved by or sacrificed for Riddick, who we're supposed to root for despite his generally displeasing, misogynistic, and violent nature. At least he's nice to a dog.


There is fun to be had in Riddick only if the brain is solidly in standby mode. The plot is nonsense,  the characters are ciphers, and even the color palette is a bit noxious. Yet the movie doesn't really outstay its welcome despite relatively poor pacing; there's enough moments of temporary spectacle to move a viewer along the film's timeline. It's not really a spoiler alert to say that Riddick ends with plenty of room for another sequel, but if you're anything like me you'll find no excitement in that proposition; you'll simply move on with your life and remember seven or eight fun minutes from Riddick and forget the rest until you see it again, edited for television, on Spike TV in four years. Riddick is unnecessary, forgettable, and hollow, but not damned by those states. It's simply the quintessential September movie.

Riddick opens today at most major multiplexes in both regular theaters and IMAX. Rated R for strong violence, language, and sexual content/nudity. Run time 1 hour 59 minutes.