From the very beginning, Riddick establishes itself as a Pitch Black sequel that isn’t going to make the same mistakes that The Chronicles of Riddick did. It opens with Riddick (Vin Diesel) broken, battered, and alone on an alien world. His leg has been snapped in half, he’s losing a lot of blood, and there are deadly creatures all around him that want to tear his throat out. For the first fifteen minutes or so of the film we just watch Riddick lick his wounds and fight monsters. For the next ten or so we just watch him bond with some sort of alien tigerdog that he raises from a pup. None of the boring exposition and plot complexities of TCOR are anywhere to be found, because this is a simple survival movie, just like Pitch Black. Well, things do get a little bit more complicated. You can only take so much of Vin Diesel talking to a CG dog.
The complications arise when Riddick and his pup find a trapper’s outpost—the first indication he’s had that the planet he’s on hasn’t always been uninhabited—and he soon after realizes that the planet is populated with a race of water-loving, giant scorpion-reptile things that are going to overpower and kill him as soon as a series of huge storms reach the area he’s in. Faced with certain death, he sounds an emergency beacon that alerts the universe to his presence, and then waits for the first ship of bounty hunters to show up and attempt to collect on the price that’s on his head. Probably easier to kill them and take their ship than take on an entire planet of monsters, after all. Complications get furthered though when two ships show up and the squabbling of the competing crews leads to everyone still being deep in conflict once the rain and the monsters arrive. The film then pushes toward a conclusion where death is closing in on everyone from every angle. Exciting stuff.
Despite the fact that the deadly creatures and the deadly criminal and all of the deadly bounty hunters lead to Riddick being full of all sorts of entertaining violence and a whole heap of instances of Riddick getting to look like the ultimate knife-wielding, trap-laying badass, there are still a few problems here. The most obvious being that, despite it effectively keeping the story simple, Riddick’s script just isn’t very good. The first film in this trilogy was written by Jim and Ken Wheat, the second by Twohy, and this time around he added two co-writers in Oliver Butcher and Stephen Cornwell, but despite all of the different influences over these various stories, one thing has united all of the Riddick movies—bad dialogue. These films are so full of clunky, boring, simpleton dialogue that every time the shooting stops and the talking starts you feel yourself unconsciously cringing.
The problems with the script don’t end with the dialogue either. There’s also a problem where Riddick has gotten so unbeatable and badass over the course of the three films that he no longer makes for a good movie hero. His unerring competence wasn’t so much of a problem in Pitch Black, because he was more of an anti-hero and we saw him through other peoples’ eyes. Here he is firmly the protagonist though, and because we know that he will never be beat and never be bested, the film can never establish the stakes that would make all of the action truly thrilling.
One thing Riddick has going for it is that Twohy has definitely developed as a director since his first film. His visual aesthetic is much smoother and more toned down, yet the film is still able to come off as being rather stylish. And he’s able to use the old horror movie trick of establishing a threat and then delaying the gratification of that threat having consequences to create a couple of situations that are pretty tense. A scene where the bounty hunters who come to get Riddick have to open a locker that’s been rigged with an explosive works especially well, even if it’s opening creates a giant leap in logic that doesn’t then get addressed. Riddick’s script doesn’t do it any favors, but seeing as the script here isn’t the focus, that doesn’t end up being such an egregious sin. By keeping the focus on a simple man vs. nature and then man vs. man survival narrative, Riddick is able to survive the fact that it isn’t all that smart.
As a matter of fact, Riddick is so focused on the strong points of this franchise and this character—simple storytelling, macho posturing, and brutal violence—that it makes a great case for being the strongest film in the franchise. There’s one aspect of it that wrecks what would have been an easy, brainless time at the movies though, and that’s the parts that get so randomly, needlessly, disturbingly misogynist that they leave you walking out of the theater feeling slightly violated and vaguely offended. Most of the offenses revolve around Katee Sackhoff’s bounty hunter character and all of the offensive ways male characters interact with her, but there’s even a couple more little things thrown in for good measure. Really, this movie is just downright rapey—and why? All of the treating women like objects and disrespecting their sexuality accomplishes absolutely nothing other than taking you out of the film and making you feel a bit disgusted. Action movies should definitely not lead to you contemplating moral issues.
