Movie Review: The Chronicles of Riddick

The Chronicles of Riddick

About five years ago, we met Riddick, a wanted murderer who became something of an anti-hero in the movie Pitch Black. Shortly after that movie was welcomed by fans and critics alike, rumors began of a sequel focusing on Riddick. The Chronicles of Riddick is that sequel. I found Pitch Black to be a wonderful surprise - a horror movie that was genuinely scary, and a science fiction film with an all too believable premise - and I thought Vin Diesel's Riddick was an exciting and intriguing character. So does the sequel live up to the original? Yes and no.

Just as five years have passed in the real world since Pitch Black was released, we're told that Riddick (Vin Diesel) has spent the last five years hiding out on an obscure planet to duck the mercenaries trying to recapture him. But when bounty hunters led by an old acquaintance (Toombs, played by Nick Chinlund) finally find him and he learns of the very high price on his head, he decides to confront the man who has almost certainly betrayed him. That man, Imam (Keith David), is one of only two other people who survived the incidents of five years before. When Riddick tracks Imam down on the planet Helion, however, he's given several pieces of bad news including the fact that the only other survivor is serving time in a maximum security prison because of crimes committed while she was trying to find him.

Despite Riddick's upset over this information, overshadowing everything is the fact that there is a hoard of invaders called Necromongers who are headed for Helion. In fact, it's because of the Necromongers that such a bounty was offered for Riddick. An elemental being named Aereon (Dame Judi Dench) reasons that sometimes great evil can only be fought with another kind of evil. She wants Riddick to help fight the Necromongers, led by the implacable Lord Marshal (Colm Feore). But Riddick's priorities lie elsewhere as he determines he must, before anything else, rescue the girl once known as Jack (Alexa Davalos) from a prison most consider utterly impossible to breach.

So while the humanity living on Helion are told by the conquering invaders they must convert to a new religion or die, and become one of the Necromongers or see their planet destroyed, Riddick must somehow remain free of the Necromongers and get to another planet. That turns out to be more difficult than it might otherwise have been, however, thanks to the machinations of a Necromonger Commander, Vaako (Karl Urban) and his scheming wife (Thandie Newton).

The Chronicles of Riddick, because it was building on a successful predecessor, had access to significantly more money than movie makers had available to them for Pitch Black (which reportedly cost "only" about $20 million). As a result, the special effects in The Chronicles of Riddick are both everywhere and are largely very well done (some CGI creatures, while quite good by standards just a couple of year ago, are the only things that don't quite make the grade of the most recently set standards). Vin Diesel has found the role meant for him, much as Arnold Schwarzenegger did in the Terminator movies. (Some critics have complained that Diesel's delivery is flat. I disagree. It's Riddick's entirely amoral and sociopathic character that's flat, and Diesel makes that attitude work even when, as it turns out, Riddick might just have an emotion or two after all.) Dame Judi Dench is good, though her role is limited; Thandie Newton is surprisingly effective as a woman whose risky schemes will make or break her all too malleable husband, while Colm Feore is just about as creepy and cocky as one might expect the Lord Marshal of the Necromongers to be. Alexa Davalos' primary attraction comes from her physical stunts (I don't know whether or not the actress did all of them herself); she seems too pretty to have spent much time in a very rough and tumble maximum security prison, and her acting is only okay.

I liked The Chronicles of Riddick in that it was good to see Riddick again as well as to learn some of his back story. The effects were also quite a bit of fun. But this movie has taken what Pitch Black did so successfully - take a very, very bad man and make you root for him - and given Riddick a little too much of a (for lack of a better word) soul. Riddick was far more compelling when he had fewer redeeming qualities. And while I understand why the filmmakers opted for a PG-13 rating, I also think the story suffered by toning it down to get away from an R rating. The story itself is all right, though the critics are right in that the script could have been better; the ending is so obviously set for another sequel that it's a little disappointing. The physics is also just about as far off from reality as is the science in The Day After Tomorrow - in other words, bearing no resemblance to reality whatsoever. Never-the-less, science fiction fans should make a point of buying a ticket to this one, and Vin Diesel fans will in no way be disappointed in their man. If you are one of the other, and can suspend your disbelief for two hours, you'll enjoy yourself.

POLITICAL NOTES: The Necromongers are, by and large, a theocracy. The "convert or die" mentality isn't new - people have been acting on such threats for millennia - but we've rarely seen the results it pictured so clearly on the big screen. The lesson here is less the horror from the perspective of the threatened than it is the fact that the theocracy is virtually all powerful and that its converts have become automatons for the state. Groupthink combined with grave threats is an incredibly powerful tools, and propaganda serves to support such campaigns. We should all of us make a point of looking beyond the propaganda and thinking for ourselves lest we become one with some government behemoth.

FAMILY SUITABILITY: The Chronicles of Riddick is rated PG-13 for "intense sequences of violent action and some language." The rating is probably just about right. There's nothing onscreen that every 13 year-old on the planet hasn't seen in a video game at one time or another. While the story isn't too complicated for younger kids, the intensity will be too much for them (not least of which involves some extreme danger to a young child at one point). Take the little ones to see Shrek 2, and let your teens wander over to another theatre in the cineplex to see The Chronicles of Riddick.