Riddick-Ulous
New Sci-Fi Adventure A Jumbled Mess

The good news about the new sci-fi flick The Chronicles of Riddick is that it features stage and screen veteran Dame Judy Dench. The bad new is that the second best actor in the film is Vin Diesel. Diesel does his gravelly-voiced best to keep The Chronicles of Riddick from sliding from sci-fi epic to sci-fi comic book, but he basically doesn’t have enough support from the cast, writers or director to save the movie from its overblown self.

Just how much can he Dench press? Hollywood’s hottest new couple, Vin Diesel and Judy Dench, on the set of the new sci-fi action flick The Chronicles of Riddick.

Diesel plays Richard B. Riddick, a man who has spent the past five years eluding mercenaries on the icy outskirts of the galaxy. He captures a mercenary spaceship and travels to the planet Helion where, by a coincidence of incalculable odds, the people with dark skin speak with Jamaican accents. Like Jamaica, Helion is a pretty cool place where people of different cultures and religions live in peace and harmony until it is invaded by Lord Marshal (Colm Feore) and his legion of warriors known as Necromongers. Marshal has been sweeping through the universe giving worlds an ultimatum: Join us or die!

Riddick fights valiantly to save his Helion friends and escapes the brutal Necromongers only to be captured by mercenaries and taken to a prison on a planet aptly named Crematoria. The planet suffers through icy nights and 900-degree days so all of the human action has to exist miles underground. On Crematoria Riddick is reunited with his love interest, Kyra (Alexa Davalos), and together they plot to return to Helios and vanquish Marshal.

Aside from being one of the simplistic sci-fi movies in a long time, The Chronicles of Riddick suffers from a multitude of situations that Mr. Spock would deem “illogical.” People travel from planet to planet very quickly in spaceships about the size of large SUVs. With this advanced space traveling technology you would think they would find some more hospitable planets to live than the three featured in the movie. At the end of the flick, Riddick and Marshal fight one-on-one despite the presence of about a thousand Necromongers.

Back in the 1960s the campy television action series Batman used to regularly employ a 15-degree camera angle whenever showing villains like The Joker or Mr. Freeze in their underground hideouts. The cockeyed camera angle clued us kids into the fact that we were witnessing crookedness in its most literal form. The makers of The Chronicles of Riddick utilize that same “Mystery Hill” angle and at least a dozen other eye-scrambling camera and editing techniques to confuse the viewer. My guess is that the director knows that if the audience was allowed to dwell on any one scene for more than a split second, it would ponder the ridiculousness of the movie as a whole. Special effects that are meant to be eye candy are really just messy segue-ways from one unbelievable scene to the next.

With The Chronicles of Riddick, director David Twohy appears to be presenting Diesel as the inheritor to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s role of sci-fi action superstar. Diesel is up to the task but, unfortunately, The Chronicles of Riddick is nowhere close to being in the same league as The Terminator series, The Running Man, Total Recall or Predator. The story is light, the attempts at humor are humorless, and, as was stated before, Diesel is the second best actor in the entire cast.

Despite these shortcomings, Twohy ends the movie with a look toward a sequel. Hopefully, the movie-going public will deny the director a chance at making another Riddick-ulous mistake.

The Chronicles of Riddick is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violent action and some language and is playing at the Chalet Triple Theater in Boone.