Riddick You Less

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I went to Riddick hoping one thing above all else - that all the Vin Diesel in the trailer was actually a sleight of hand and it'd end up being Starbuck Fights Monsters: The Movie. It is sadly not that.

But let me get back to that in a sec - in all seriousness I love Pitch Black and I figured maybe they'd learned their lesson with the overblown Chronicles of Riddick and this would be a return to the first movie's smaller scale. In a weird way, Riddick actually ends up straddling both films - the first half is pretty gangbusters, with its itty bitty love affair between boy and dog (reminiscent of the good first part of I Am Legend, actually), as the two creatures suss out the harsh world they find themselves in. There's a terrifying flashback to events from Chronicles that momentarily murders the well-established mood (terrifying solely because I didn't need to be reminded of Chronicles at all, not even if yes it gives us Karl Urban in eyeliner) but mostly the first half of Riddick is lo-fi man and his dog versus a monster storytelling, and director David Twohy generally knows how to wring tension out of a moist toilette of a story as long as things are kept simple.

But then a crowd of bounty hunters show up and the inevitable apparently inescapable riffing on Aliens begins and it becomes a pretty by-the-numbers affair, with single characteristic'd cardboard cut-outs lumbering around waiting to be offed. Most sadly of all is what they actually do with Katee Sackhoff, an actress I loved on Battlestar and I've weep for in the years post-Battlestar where nobody's taken her up on her promise - pretty much every single line of dialogue involving her is about her being a lesbian, or someone wanting to have sex with her. Here's how her scenes go. "I wanna fuck you, lady. "I don't fuck guys!" "You'll fuck me!" "I will not, due to me lesbianism!" "Lesbian schmesbian!" " Dyke McGee, that is me!" It is totally, utterly beyond believably ridiculous.

And what do you know, in the end Vin Diesel (yes Vin Diesel, who "only dates in Europe") is just too much man for her not to wrap her legs around. The horror.

That aside (although that's a big, huge aside, you guys! It is 2013, right?) Twohy still manages to keep things moving and give us a couple of edge-of-seat set-pieces amid the tomfoolery. The monsters have a terrific design (the scorpian tail with the clacking face!) but they could've used a lot more actual personality - when it was just one in the first section it had some, but like everything in the second half it just becomes Too Much, and suddenly there's a billion of them that're offed with ease, an inkily pixilated mash spotted amid lightning flashes.

The most disappointing thing about the movie is, it was obviously a passion project for Diesel so there is a lot of very strange personality grafted onto the routine SyFy trappings, and I wish it let its freak flag fly a little bit more, instead of getting bogged down in third act over-the-top shenanigans with way too many characters and monsters. It needed more of the side-eyes about "riding bitch" and of Diesel airing his butt-cheeks in the distance on a mountain top beside a lovingly painted sunset. There was a real Creature Feature for the ages tied up dying to get out here. As is, there are embers that singe your eyes every now and then.
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