Riddick is a 2013 British-American science fiction film on DVD, the third
installment in the The Chronicles of Riddick film series. Produced by and
starring Vin Diesel.
Third instalment in The Chronicles Of Riddick Series. The infamous Riddick
has been left for dead on a sun-scorched planet that appears to be lifeless.
Soon, however, he finds himself fighting for survival against alien predators
more lethal than any human he’s encountered.
The only way out is for Riddick to activate an emergency beacon and alert
mercenaries who rapidly descend to the planet in search of their bounty. The
first ship to arrive carries a new breed of merc, more lethal and violent, while
the second is captained by a man whose pursuit of Riddick is more personal. With
time running out and a storm on the horizon that no one could survive, his
hunters won’t leave the planet without Riddick’s head as their trophy.
Riddick Movie Review
From the dusty annals of a science-fiction franchise belonging to another
age, that of “Pitch Black” (2000) and “The Chronicles of Riddick” (2004)
and several video game variations, here's a modestly scaled summer picture
continuing the legend that time and many moviegoers forgot. And it's fun!
Extremely violent, cleverly managed fun, full of eviscerating aliens, Vin Diesel
making those little swimmer goggles look sharp and Katee Sackhoff of
“Battlestar Galactica” swaggering around as a sexually ambiguous bounty
hunter stuck with a bunch of guys on a crummy planet, ruled (more or less) by
the escaped prisoner Riddick, whose story is recapped in “Riddick” but
there's not much to it, don't worry.
This is not one of those Johnny-come-lately sequels preoccupied with
getting a new audience up to speed on where the story was. It's about living in
the moment, in the now, and killing in the now.
The character name Riddick has a twee, sprightly air, two adjectives
which do not bring Vin Diesel to mind. But he's the one taking care of his
adversaries in a plot line recalling Agatha Christie's “And Then There Were
None,” except here it's: “And Then There Was Vin.”
And here's the beauty part, to the extent writer-director David
Twohy's simple, compact movie can be called beautiful: The bounty hunters are
all individuals, and you actually care about some of them, so it's not simply a
“Saw”-type grinder of a movie, wherein we wonder how the next side of beef
is going to get sliced. I mean, we do wonder that, but there are other things
going on.
“Riddick” opens with a near-wordless sequence set on a hot, scrubby
planet, where our antihero, betrayed by the Necromongers — there, that's it:
done with the plot summary — is left for dead among the winged beasts and
slithering giant scorpion- and fanged squid-like denizens of the swamps. The
opening half-hour of Twohy's picture is a grabber, a chronicle of Riddick
dealing with the swamp things and his domestication of a dingo-type alien jackal
dog. The occasional voice-over (“Whole damn planet wanted a piece of me”)
reminds us that Riddick can, in fact, speak if needed.
Then come the bounty hunters, some old, some new, and “Riddick” turns
into a different picture, one that scrambles your sympathies nicely as Riddick
squares off against the meanest of them while everyone contends with ace
creature designer Patrick Tatopoulos' alien animal kingdom. The movie is worth
seeing simply for the ace-of-spades-shaped ears on the
hero's pet dingo.
The first half's more compelling than the second; the flying effects,
with zippy hovercrafts, look cheeseball; and the whole of “Riddick” smacks
of being filmed in GreenScreenLand, which it was. (And Montreal.) More
persuasively than the recent “After Earth” and “Oblivion,” “Riddick”
makes an entertaining survival-guide virtue of its main
character's isolation. The side characters all get their share of profane
zingers. The audience came away sated. In the 13 years since the first Riddick
chronicle, Diesel has discovered what it means to be a certain kind of movie
star, working hard but not too, serving material that, here, does what
it's supposed to do. Chicago Tribune
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