Author: Flatty
Date: 8/9/04
Rating: 4.0
Movie Rating: R
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As a fan of the original Riddick movie, Pitch Black, I was curious how this addition to the Riddick series would turn out. Sure, the "professional movie critics" trashed the movie, but I was willing to give it a chance. Boy, do I regret that decision.
First off, the story has been pretty much played out. An evil all powerful alien race has come to enslave the entire universe, but they run into trouble against just one human (well, Riddick isn't technically... forget it). This story has been told a million times, and often in a much better way than the Chronicles of Riddick managed to do it. But the movie developers were clever, and they decided to put a different spin on the flick. It's not a good vs evil battle, but it's instead an evil vs. more evil battle. That was one of the big successes of the first film (Pitch Black) in that Riddick was indeed "evil" in that one, and the good guys had to rely on him to take out the baddies.
However, the Chronicles of Riddick falls well short of showing Riddick up as a bad guy. You know, having him rescue people and kill really bad guys is not a good means of setting up an evil-doer. So, he's an ex-con. Whatever. I know a few myself, and they're not so bad. Despite the movie makers' best efforts, they did not produce an original story line, and they didn't even do a good job of telling an overused one.
So, now that picking at the story is out of the way, we can get into the details. Let's look at the acting. Ok, it's starring Vin Diesel.
We're done with the acting section. Let's move on to ACTION. I'll grant it, this movie had some decent action scenes in it, but with poor setups. The scenes with the bounty hunters doing anything was just painful to watch. I couldn't follow their logic or reasons for doing anything that they did. Why stay in the prison after dropping off Riddick? Why leave a convenient escape path for Riddick? Why why why?? But, whatever.
Vin provides some big muscled fist pounding, knife slashing, rappelling away from a burning sun action. Kudos to him for that. I don't want to give away too much, but the ending fight is actually pretty cool. Just the fight itself though. The head bad guy has some pretty sweet moves and I appreciate it that Riddick was not able to triumph over him. But then we get to the very end of the movie and things just get a little ridiculous.
At least they're not setting us up for another sequel / triquel / suckquel. At least, I hope they aren't, because the ending of the Chronicles of Riddick would be the worst setup for a continued story... ever.