Riddick movie review
September 9, 2013 5:10 am | 1 Comment
Spoiler Alert – I am about to do you a favor and spoil what happens in this film. This should take about five minutes.
How could a production go so wrong? The film opens with an apparently dead hand being picked at by carrion when the hand suddenly grasps the neck of the bird picking at it. This scene would have been more thrilling if we had not seen it before. This entire movie would have been better if we had not seen it all before.
I did not know going into this thing that Karl Urban was in the movie. I fist pumped as his name came across the opening credits. Unfortunately, Vin Diesel probably realized that Karl completely overshadowed him in the last movie so Urban’s Vaako is in the movie for all of five minutes. Vaako tells Riddick that he will take him to Furia, Riddick’s home planet, if Riddick will relinquish his leadership of the Necromongers. But it apparently doesn’t occur to Riddick that Vaako’s religion dictates that he must be killed to complete this transition of power. As soon as they arrive on the mystery planet, Riddick is backstabbed and left for dead.
The entire first hour of the film involves Riddick fighting the indigenous wildlife and regaining his “inner animal”. He takes shelter in a cave system that is populated by scorpion-like monsters that hide in pools of water away from the sun. Riddick, the ultimate psychopath space-MacGyver, fashions rudimentary weapons and tools to fight these creatures thus establishing to his new pet, a space pit bull, that he is the top of the food chain on this rock. He refers to his new pet pit bull as an escape artist, but I never actually caught what he named him. I guess your dog’s name isn’t important when he is only going to be used as a plot device to make Riddick really angry when the dog is inevitably killed by the mercenarys Riddick lures to the planet using a distress call from a crashed ship.
Two mercenary ships answer the call. One is captained by a cutthroat who releases the captive they have to make room for Riddick only to shoot her in the back as she runs from the ship. The other crew of hunters is lead by a man from Riddick’s past. This second crew introduces my second major complaint with this film. Katee Sackhoff was the main reason that I went to see this movie in the first place. Her character Dahl, get it – “Doll”, is referred to as a lesbian over and over again because she is not trying to sleep with all the men around her, but then immediately is drawn to Riddick from the moment they meet. Apparently, Riddick’s glowing eyes also have the ability to humidify any woman he meets. I have loved Sackhoff ever since her role in Battlestar Galactica as Starbuck, but I was very disappointed that she gave up the goods in a completely gratuitous nude scene that had Riddick perving out on her which he later brags about. I officially started to hate the movie when Dahl told Riddick that her dying wish would be to straddle him.
The largely green screened imagery of the film was a complete rehash of the first film in the franchise Pitch Black. The score added to the monotony of the story by repeating the same dirge over and over. I went to go see this film in my local Carmike Cinemas IMAX theater so that I could be blown away by their amazing sound system. The amazing quality of the boring music only served to pinpoint how much of a waste of time this movie was. For god’s sake, I left for a smoke break just to give myself a pep talk that the film couldn’t possibly get any worse.
Please people, save your hard earned money and toss this shit.
Tags: Pitch Black, Riddick, Riddick Movie Review, Vin Diesel
Categorised in: Movie Reviews, Random Reviews & News
This post was written by David Griffin
Thanks, I think you just saved me some money. Doesn’t sound like what I wanted to see.