Riddick opens on a man who has run out of things to run from. Five years after Kyra’s death, Richard B. Riddick sits uneasy as Lord Marshal of the Necromonger fleet, a throne he never wanted and a faith he refuses to swear into. David Twohy, who wrote and directed, has made the third chapter of The Chronicles of Riddick, and it is a smaller, harder film than the one before it. It is also a mess, and a sometimes absorbing one.
Trailer, via eOne UK.
A Broken Leg on an Unnamed Planet
The setup is lean. Riddick strikes a deal with Commander Vaako: the location of Furya and a ship to take him there, in exchange for Vaako succeeding him as Lord Marshal so he can achieve transcendence. Vaako’s aide Krone leads Riddick and a group of Necromongers to a desolate planet. It is not Furya. When the escorts try to kill him, Riddick kills most of them. Krone brings down a landslide and buries him alive.
Riddick crawls out with a broken leg. He sets and splints it while fighting off the native life: vulture-like flyers, packs of jackal-like beasts, and giant venomous scorpion-like water dwellers called Mud Demons. He hides in abandoned ruins to heal. This stretch is the film’s best, and its quietest. Vin Diesel has played this character four times now, and here he does less than usual. He does not talk much. He watches, waits, and kills.
Injecting Venom to Build Immunity
Once healed, Riddick finds a savanna beyond the cliffs. The only way through is a set of muddy pools crawling with Mud Demons. His answer is to inject himself with their venom until he is immune, then build improvised melee weapons and fight his way past. He also raises and trains an orphaned jackal-beast pup. The film does not explain the immunity, and it does not need to. It is a survival mechanic, and it works as one.
Then the story changes shape. Riddick finds a mercenary station, reads the approaching storms as a threat, and trips the emergency beacon. His identity goes out to every bounty hunter in range. Two ships answer.
Santana and Johns Arrive
The first ship belongs to Santana, a violent and unstable bounty hunter, played by Jordi Mollà. His crew includes second-in-command Diaz (Dave Bautista), the preacher Luna (Nolan Gerard Funk), Vargas (Conrad Pla), Falco (Danny Blanco Hall), Nuñez (Noah Danby), and Rubio (Neil Napier). The second ship is led by Colonel R. “Boss” Johns, played by Matt Nable, a professional mercenary whose son William J. Johns died during the events of Pitch Black. Johns wants answers about how.
Katee Sackhoff plays Dahl, Johns’s lieutenant and the crew’s sniper. Dahl and Santana dislike each other on sight. Johns later puts Dahl in charge of Santana’s crew, and she holds that command through the film’s closing stretch. Bokeem Woodbine is Moss, one of Johns’s people, who has a quiet encounter with Riddick that leaves him shaken. Raoul Trujillo is Lockspur, who has met the mud creatures before. Karl Urban returns as Vaako.
This is a lot of people, and the film does not give most of them enough to do. Santana is loud. Diaz is quiet. Luna is the voice of reason, repeatedly pushing everyone to take Riddick’s offer and leave rather than fight. That is roughly the whole of him.
The Cast, and What It Gets
- Vin Diesel as Riddick, last of the Furyan race and a notorious criminal outlaw
- Matt Nable as Colonel R. “Boss” Johns, pursuing Riddick for answers about his son
- Jordi Mollà as Santana, the first bounty hunter to arrive
- Katee Sackhoff as Dahl, Johns’s lieutenant and sniper
- Dave Bautista as Diaz, Santana’s lieutenant
- Bokeem Woodbine as Moss, one of Johns’s crew
- Raoul Trujillo as Lockspur, who has encountered the mud creatures
- Nolan Gerard Funk as Luna, Santana’s good luck charm and the voice of reason
- Karl Urban as Commander Siberius Vaako
Survival Is His Revenge
The tagline is “Survival Is His Revenge,” and the film means it. Riddick does not hunt the mercenaries so much as use them. Once they are on the ground, they become pawns in a larger scheme, and he unleashes a vicious attack of vengeance with his enemies exactly where he wants them. Then he heads home to Furya to save it from destruction. That last beat lands flat, because the film has spent two hours on a rock and about four minutes on the planet it keeps promising.
The middle act is where Riddick works. A man alone, wounded, building tools, training an animal, solving a problem with his hands. Twohy shoots this plainly. There is no grandeur to it, and the film is better for the lack of grandeur. When the mercenaries show up, the tension thins. The ensemble bickers, the storms close in, and the whole thing becomes a siege picture with too many faces and not enough reasons to care about any of them.
What the Numbers Say
- Release date: September 6, 2013 (United States)
- Runtime: 119 minutes
- Metacritic: 49/100
- Critical score: 4.9/10
- Series position: third installment, after The Chronicles of Riddick (2004)
A Return to Form, and a Small One
Critics considered Riddick a return to form for the series, and it became a moderate box-office success compared to its predecessor. Both of those things are true and both are modest. A return to form here means a return to Pitch Black’s stripped-down premise: one man, one hostile planet, a handful of people who want him dead. That is a real correction after the bloated 2004 film. It is not, on its own, a good movie.
The character was created by Jim and Ken Wheat, and Twohy has now written and directed three films around him. The fourth, Riddick: Furya, is in development. That is the part worth watching. The film ends by pointing at Furya, and the next one is finally going there.
Where the Film Runs Out of Road
Riddick is at its best when it is quiet and alone, and it is at its worst when it fills the frame with people. The first hour, with a broken leg and a pack of jackal-beasts, is the strongest stretch Twohy has made in this series. The second half hands the movie to a crew that never earns its screen time. Santana is a shouting problem. Luna is a conscience with one line of argument. Dahl is the only newcomer with a spine, and Sackhoff makes the most of a part that mostly requires her to stand up to men.
Diesel is the reason any of this holds. He plays Riddick as a man who has been domesticated by a throne and is relieved to be an animal again, and he does it without speeches. The film trusts him to carry long stretches alone, and he can. What he cannot carry is a script that keeps introducing people and then forgetting them.
The storms, the Mud Demons, the venom immunity, the trained pup: these are good, concrete ideas, and the film uses them. The bounty hunters are not. Riddick needed either fewer of them or more time with each, and it has neither. It is a survival picture that keeps interrupting its own survival.
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