DIESEL POWER
Vin’s brawny biceps fuel sci-fi creature feature, Riddick
The appearance in a movie of Vin Diesel is a cause for half-hearted cheers — hip-hip ho-hum — but things are slightly brighter in Riddick. This is, after all, the film franchise that made Diesel what he is today: a second-tier, no-nonsense action hero with no extraneous screen magnetism to get in the way of our appreciation of that straight-outta-the-neighbourhood mug and pleasingly sour disposition.
He’s an action hero for people who don’t especially want an action hero.
It’s been nine years since The Chronicles of Riddick, and in the meantime the adventures of this lost-in-space convict have become at once more complex and more stripped down. For one thing, Riddick rids the franchise of all those Shakespearean actors — Judi Dench and Colm Feore had roles in the 2004 film — and replaces them with the likes of Matt Nable, a former rugby star-turned-actor and the new film’s chief bad guy. The enunciation takes a pounding, but the bicep count improves considerably.
Riddick, the third film in the series (Pitch Black was the surprise hit of 2000), finds our anti-hero on a distant planet where he was dispatched after becoming king of a group called the Necromancers — a post that gave him access to four naked women at a time, if I understand the flashback correctly — but either rejected it or had it snatched from him. Hard to say, really.
Actually, the entire first half-hour of Riddick is something of a jumble, but while you may experience vague yearning to know what the hell is going on, it’s easy to relax into the set design: a yellow planet, Riddick’s purple-eye-view of events (he sees in the dark with laser vision) and a bunch of frightening prehistoric/alien beasts.
These include a sort of dingo-hyena combination with a bit of zebra thrown in, and a scary seabound creature with scorpion pincers. It looks like what might happen if Jurassic Park took place on Atlantis.
Eventually, Riddick kills some of these, tames one of the dingo-hyena things to be his pet — a sabre-tooth Lassie — and heads to a nearby rocket base where he hopes to corral a spaceship and get out of there. Riddick is both a wanted man and a feared killer, a combination Diesel evokes with his all-purpose glower and forearms that have held up surprisingly well, considering.
The film really starts with the arrival of two sets of mercenaries: a ragtag group headed by Santana (Jordi Molia, a Spanish actor-painter, which is kind of cool in and of itself), who wants Riddick’s head in a box — he’s brought the box with him — and Johns (Nable), a more organized bounty hunter whose crew not only has matching outfits, but they also include the comely Dahl (Katee Sackhoff). She is a busty tough gal who is also identified as a lesbian, mostly so she can endorse Riddick’s pansexual appeal. She also adds some toplessness to the film’s second half, in case you’re nodding off.
The movie settles into to being about the unshaven louts of this or that team being killed by Riddick after they say things like, “I don’t care what they say. He’s one guy,” which is kind of asking for it. There’s also something about Johns’s history with Riddick, but unless you have an awfully good memory for this sort of thing, it won’t mean much.
Nor does it matter. Riddick isn’t a study of psychology or revenge. It’s a study of cool flying motorcycles and guys with big muscles and space-age weapons, not to mention a “holy s--t” moment of comeuppance that is destined to become a classic. It’s easy to recognize, because when it happens, someone says, “Holy s--t.”
Riddick ends with the possibility of future adventures, which is easy to do: Writer-director David Twohy just has to invent another preposterous planet, stick Vin Diesel there and unleash the computerized effects. Maybe it will make sense and maybe it won’t and who cares? As long as Vin Diesel is around, being cranky.