3SR: Hopefully the worst film I will have to lose hours of my life to this year. Tired, rapey and full of itself. Not worth the price of admission.
Starring: Vin Diesel, Katee Sackhoff and Karl Urban
Written and directed by David Twohy
Action, science fiction, thriller. 1hr 58mins. R16 for violence, sexual references and offensive language.
If there’s one good I take away from Riddick, it’s that I’m unlikely to have to endure a worse film this year.
It’s late September and we’ve only just started to scrape the bottom of the action barrel with Vin Diesel’s meat-slab of a face, but I’m not sure how a film could be worse and still make it into cinemas.
When legendary intergalactic badass, Richard B. Riddick (Vin Diesel) is stranded on an extremely hostile planet, he realises his years leading those no good Necromongers across the galaxy on an endless orgy of sex and violence have made him soft.
‘‘I need to get some of the animal back,’’ he says. Which apparently means taking off all his clothes, climbing a hill and looking off into the distance.
After making friends with the local dog-alikes, one of which becomes his sidekick and canine pal, Riddick is ready to settle down to a life of hunting stuff and wearing it’s skins.
Only the planet has other ideas. There’s a storm coming and it’s made entirely of mud-dwelling, poison-spewing scorpion-lizard-raptors!
Keen not to be eaten, Riddick sets off an alarm to bring bounty hunters he can intimidate into giving him a ship.
Only the bounty hunters bring a lot more testosterone with them than Riddick anticipated and things get… gorily complicated.
When you put down $16 for a film about legendary heroes battling cruel mercenaries and even crueller monsters you want to be entertained and thrilled.
What you do not want is Riddick: David Twohy’s embarrassing ego trip and a clutch of tired, woman hating jokes all wrapped up in a trite, senseless plot that meanders around looking for a purpose like a Friday night drunk looking for a party.
From the long, boring introduction, to the sickeningly self indulgent voice over, Riddick is almost a parody of space-opera actioners, redolent with stereotypes, hamfisted one liners and shonkey special effects.
Diesel, who I am sure is has many redeeming qualities – none of them acting, blunders through the film emoting all over it like a desperate 14-year-old trying Shakespeare for the first time.
Everything he does is so weighted with meaning and importance – even heroically threatening to rape the one female character who’s managed to survive the film’s manly musk – it’s a wonder the poor guy can move at all.
But move about he does, slaughtering bad guys and scorpion-lizard-raptors by the score with only the promise of forcing himself on Dahl (Katee Sackoff) at the end to get him through. What a guy.
Bottom line, if you’re in the mood for some great action and extreme violence then forget Riddick(ulous), see White House Down instead.
Related articles
- Riddick (moviemaniac1268.wordpress.com)
- Diesel’s interplanetary action tale a bit Riddick-ulous (dailyherald.com)
- Movie Review: What Riddick 3 Teaches Us About Survival (Spoilers!) (glenniacampbell.typepad.com)
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