Locations/Showings
Featuring Mainstream &
Art House Choices

Forum
Scary Movie 3 was neither scary nor a movie. Discuss this & more.

Reviews
Glorifications & Executions of the latest Movies, DVDs, and television shows.

Flashback Flicks
Krull and other "Lost" Classics get their day in the sun.

Crapmasterpieces
So darn crappy they're hilariously brilliant.

TV Highlights
Boob Tube Playtime!

Calendar
A movie/tv related calendar. Covers openings, DVD release dates, conventions etc.

The Chronicles of Riddick

Starring: Vin Diesel, Colm Feore, Thandie Newton, Judi Dench, Karl Urban, Alexa Davalos, Linus Roache, Nick Chinlund
Director: David Twohy

Reviewed by Larry Stanley

First, let’s understand that Vin Diesel is not exactly a great actor. Yes, he is a decent looking man (if you are into macho, massive slabs of beef with arms like most peoples thighs).

He is a fairly limited actor with a small range. The odds of him sticking around as long as Arnie are not going to be easy to calculate. Watch the film and you will understand that line.

Normally, muscle guys do have a very limited acting career. They usually wind up doing action films with little or variation. Steve Reeves, Lou Ferrigno, The Rock and Dolph Lundgren, generally find their acting roles focusing on those types of films.

It is unusual for one of these guys to be able to break away from type casting to do something else.

Now, while Vin Diesel has actually done one or two good movies (XXX and… The Fast and the Furious, I’ll go with that one) he is still, so far, untested in anything else. But he still can’t carry a film on his own talent.

And that is the power of The Chronicles or Riddick, the rest of the cast.

True, he is always able to deliver just what is expected from him in most of his roles. He is good with the action sequences and can deliver some halfway decent one-liners.

His voiceovers in this film, used to introduce scenes, are not exactly the same as hearing James Earl Jones deliver the same lines. But, as a set up to what we know is coming, it is actually pretty good. Even if he does sound a lot like the voice on the other end of an answering machine from 1980.

Repeating his character of Riddick from the hit Pitch Black of 5 years ago, he is now one of the most wanted men in the universe, mainly because they are hoping to use him to fight a new threat to the people of the civilized planets.

Tracked down on a world he has been hiding on since that last battle, he steals the space ship of the Mercenary’s and heads off to track down the people he trusted and he feels betrayed him.

He becomes involved in a battle with the evil bad-guys, the Necromongers, who want to either convert everyone alive to their religion or kill them. Pretty simple, huh? Thank heaven no one now is like that.

Caught again by mercenaries, he is sold to a prison where the girl Jackie has been imprisoned for some years. She was the child who was also saved when Riddick defeated the other evil creatures in Pitch Black.

Now known as Kyra and played by Alexa Davalos, she seems as vicious and cold hearted as Riddick.

Escaping from this place results in a nice battle that uses extensive wirework and CGI, but is actually one of the better scenes of this type I have seen in a film in a while. It is so far above the last two Matrix films it is not even funny.

The final battle is not only exciting, but also somewhat shocking. Yes, the clues were there, but certainly never expected. And a nice set up to the possible franchise I have heard bandied about.

Speaking of the CGI, they were quite well done most of the time. Yes, there were one of two scenes where you could obviously see the blue screen behind the actors. But, in general they were very good. One of the best things to me was the design of the space ships. They were fairly original, and looked pretty dang good. They looked like Space Ships.

If you remember the original Star Wars, you know what I am talking about. The ships in that film were original, and innovating in their own way. Since then most of the space ships have been cookie cutter designs. They all look the same, at least to me.

So, the ships here while not perfect from the imagination, they were way beyond what we are used to.

And the landscapes from the various planets were (I hate this term) cool. God. Anyway, they looked like what I (at least) want a futuristic city and society to look like. As little like St. Louis as possible, but with enough still recognizable features to know they were human based.

The rest of the cast:  Thandie Newton as Dame Vaako is just as beautiful here as she ever has been. This is a woman we see WAY to little of in movies. With her face and figure, she should be a lot more visible then she has been. Here she is the plotter, hoping to push her husband into the role of leader and master of the universe.

Judi Dench was perfect as the ghost like figure who tells the story of what type of being Riddick is, and her voice is still as strong and beautiful as it ever was. It is difficult to see anyone else in the role after watching her. She is, more or less, the mother figure for Riddick, even though he seldom interacts with her.

As the bad guys, Colm Feore who plays the Lord Marshall, the leader of the Necromongers, is wonderfully evil. Filled with massive and amazing power, he rules with an iron hand and a firm belief in his destiny to either destroy or convert every living human in the universe.

Karl Urban as Vaako, the husband of Thandie Newton’s character (I hate him) is just the sort of bad guy you want to hate. Cruel, almost diabolic and yet at the same time almost henpecked by his wife, he is not only fun to watch, but to hope for his downfall as well.

Finally, Alexa Davalos as the grown up Jackie is beautiful and did a great job in her role. Her character grew up in a horrible, terrifying manner and it is reflected in her demeanor and style. She is great here.  

The film moves along at a good speed, never giving any chance to the viewer to catch his breath for very long. The prison scenes were some of the most confusing, and possibly to ‘fast’; but watching Riddick tame the kitties was worth the price of admission.

See this on the big screen; please don’t wait for the DVD. Oh, don’t misunderstand; I will own the DVD, if for no other reason then to see everything that might have been left out.

Someone asked me if I would watch this again. Yes.

I mean, Thandie Newton walking along in her strapless costume is worth watching once more.

Not that I noticed honey, in case you ever read this.

Rating:

(2 1/2 out of 4 stars)

Larry Stanley is the editor and publisher of Penguin Comics and Movies, located at http://www.penguincomics.net and has done over 500 movie reviews in his career. He is also a contributing reviewer to Cultcuts magazine (http://www.cultcuts.net) and Columbia360 (http://www.columbia360.com/) as well the magazine Devine Exploitation.

Want to discuss this, and other topics, with fellow fans?
Post your thoughts in the SJ Fanboy Forum now!