“There are bad days, and then there are legendary bad days,” Vin
Diesel’s lumpy muscleman says in hard-boiled narration during the opening
moments of Riddick.
Today is most definitely one of the latter, although Riddick
doesn’t have many lounging-in-sweatpants days or
eating-cereal-out-of-salad-bowls-while-watching-Cartoon-Network days. So how he
judges good days from bad seems to be determined by how much murder he commits.
Today there is murder, though not an exorbitant amount. Give him a day or two
to catch up.
I will not hide my true feelings about the Riddick franchise: it
seems entirely unnecessary. Certainly Pitch
Black was interesting as a sci-fi horror experiment, but I would have never
guessed it could launch an entire string of sci-fi murderfests. My estimation
was reinforced with 2004’s The Chronicles
of Riddick, overproduced, overcooked, overwritten space schlock. It was to Pitch Black what The Scorpion King was to that Mummy
movie that spawned it — it was the red-headed step-child. Surely, the franchise
was dead now, right?
Nope.
Now here we are with Riddick,
a movie so impossibly redeeming to the franchise that I’m actually looking
forward to the next entry. Yeah, folks, Riddick
is fantastic, devilishly so. It shocked me how fun it was. I could have left
the theater to find Vin Diesel personally washing and detailing my car and I
would not have been more surprised than I was with Riddick, with its wacky sense of purpose, its macabre humor and
Diesel, glowing as he plays the galaxy’s unluckiest ultimate warrior.
The movie involves a simple premise, to which the movie will
forever be in its debt: Riddick is marooned on a planet by
villains from the last movie. He hacks his way through the local bestiary to a
remote outpost, a cop-op shack used by galactic mercenaries. He turns on the
beacon to be rescued, but the beacon scans his body and alerts a fleet of hired
killers that Richard B. Riddick, a wanted man with a large bounty, is the one
making the call for help. Two different merc teams arrive to collect. They want
Riddick, and Riddick wants a ship to fly home. And that’s all there is to it.
The first 30 minutes of the movie are the most curious, though,
as Riddick hoofs it across a Martian-like wasteland. For a franchise so
obsessed with needless action and laser battles, I was struck at this
sequence’s slow pace: Riddick hides in a sulfer pool to escape dingoes, he
wedges his broken leg in a crack to perform a maneuver not recommended by your
local chiropractor, and he injects himself with a swamp bug’s venom to build up
an immunity. The whole sequence creeps along at a lazy pace with Diesel’s
trademark octave-dredging voice. Speaking of his voice, if the fabled Brown
Note exists it must certainly exist within Diesel’s doomy rumble, often
compared to an idling Harley Davidson but with more gravel and grinding. (For
Brown Note history, please refer to South Park
Eventually, Riddick activates the emergency beacon and two
separate teams of killers arrive to claim the bounty. One team is made up of
ruthless hooligans and murderous madmen. The other team is more professional
with “matchy matchy” uniforms and a sense of integrity that must pass as space
ethics in their line of work. The second team also has a lady, Dahl (Katee
Sackhoff, Starbuck from Battlestar
Galactica), who is threatened with rape so many times that I lost count.
This is my only complaint with Riddick:
in the future, in space and even on awe-inspiring distant planets men think
rape jokes are funny. Even her name — Dahl, as in “sex doll” — seems like a
perverse pun for Riddick’s more
misogynist subset of Neanderthal fans.
Mostly, though, Riddick
is campy, which is charming under the film’s unique arrangement of sci-fi
conditions. Riddick, for example, roams the alien prairies with this giant
Flinstones-sized switchblade made out of animal bone. In other sequences, men
ride hovering jetbikes are photographed against hilariously obvious green
screens. The effect reminded me of those early surf movies with a bunch of
actors standing on stationary surfboards as waves were projected on screens
behind them and members of the crew dumped buckets of water from outside the
frame. Other Riddick campiness
includes a bit with a package of outdated “crab enchilada hash” and an actual
segment of dialogue wrapped around the line “take the jinx out of our janx.”
Another sequence, a 10-minute segment involving an explosive combination lock
on a storage cabinet, is equal parts thriller and comedy.
I’ve seen much better movies this year, but Riddick is the first high-octane action bonanza that didn’t make me
roll my eyes with every new scene. It’s not high art, nor is it cinematic brilliance.
But it is an entirely capable and completely entertaining big-budget action
movie. And though the violence is often grisly and the tones dark, Riddick seems to have been made by
people with wicked senses of humor because it shows up there on the screen.
Assuming the next franchise entry is as original as this one,
this Riddick guy might have some staying power after all.
