Review by Ben Bussey
Remember when you’d never heard of Vin Diesel? Remember when this fairly unassuming little movie called Pitch Black showed up, and delivered a far better sci-fi/horror take on Assault on Precinct 13 than John Carpenter himself had managed with Ghosts of Mars (and I say that as someone who actually quite likes Ghost of Mars)? Well, Vin Diesel and returning writer-director David Twohy certainly remember those days – and it seems they’ve done everything in their power to bring them back with this labour of love, return-to-square-one third instalment in the Riddick series. The film doesn’t ignore the events of the ill-advised second movie The Chronicles of Riddick, but casually puts them to one side, getting back to what we really want to see – one gravel-voiced badass trapped on an unfriendly planet full of seriously nasty monsters, whose only hope of getting out of there is to form an uneasy alliance with the other humans, who either want to imprison or kill him.
Riddick is a film it could be very easy to be indifferent about. It’s a sequel to a movie from about a decade ago, mid-budget, C-list cast, following a pretty standard formula – indeed, it often feels less like a sequel to Pitch Black than an outright remake. And yet, there’s a certain charm to movies like this these days, for the simple reason that they don’t get made that often anymore. Nowadays, in most instances low-budget action/creature features are really low-budget, with one-time marquee names like Lundgren, Van Damme and Seagal now mainstays of supermarket DVD shelves; and on the other side you’ve got the megabudget Hollywood productions, which more often than not water everything down for a PG-13 – not unlike The Chronicles of Riddick did. It’s comparatively rare these days that we get a movie which occupies the middle ground in terms of scale and budget, and doesn’t hold back from a restrictive rating. Though the suits tend not to covet the audience for this type of fare, it most definitely exists, hence Dredd made such a big splash in a small pond.
Is Riddick as good as Dredd? Definitely not. It’s not as good as Pitch Black either. But it certainly is making the effort to give the fans what they want, and pay homage to all manner of old-school testosterone-fuelled cinema (aside from the old Assault on Precinct 13 influence, it’s not hard to detect the hints of Rambo, Predator, and a textbook Apocalypse Now homage). On top of all that, though, Riddick has some curious things going on under the surface which I suspect may make some academics very happy indeed.
First off, for what seems like such a simple popcorn movie, it has a pretty unorthodox structure. For much of the first act it’s essentially Tom Hanks’ Castaway in space, with Riddick going Robinson Crusoe on the hostile rock where he’s somehow found himself marooned. These early scenes play out almost entirely without dialogue, and it feels like about twenty-five minutes in once we get a flashback that explains how he ended up there. It’s not too long until the classic rag-tag bunch of interstellar mercenaries show up in hopes of claiming the bounty on Riddick’s shiny, goggles-clad head – and then, for what feels like about the same length of time, Riddick all but disappears. It’s a curious decision to go from an opening which focuses entirely on the title character, only to omit him almost entirely for much of the second act – but this serves to make Riddick a source of dread again.
Or does it? Really, does anyone find Vin Diesel intimidating anymore? I’m not going to assume that everyone alive has ever seen his Facebook page (though in fairness he does seem to have about 100 billion likes), but really, after you’ve seen enough shots of him staring wistfully at the sunset whilst waking barefoot on a beach, it’s not so easy to buy him as Mr Tough Guy.
Here, I suppose, is where I might do well to tread carefully… perhaps we haven’t all seen his Facebook, but I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that most of us have at some point heard the rumours that Vin Diesel is gay, which to the best of my knowledge he has never confirmed or denied. Of course it’s nobody’s business but his own either way – although, again, he’s posted enough Facebook photos of himself staring wistfully at the sunset whilst waking barefoot on a beach for it to feel like he just might be dropping a hint, nor are any of his movies are exactly short on homoerotic overtones. However, there’s something more going on in Riddick. Devin Faraci over at Badass Digest has already spoken at length about the bizarre psychosexual subtext of this movie (e.g. Riddick turned off by naked concubines, yet flirting creepily with Katee Sackhoff’s Dahl – the film’s one confirmed gay character), and I can’t really add anything to his assessment; I’d be lying if I said I knew exactly what Diesel and Twohy are trying to say here, but I don’t think for a second that any of it is unintentional.
But assuming you want to ignore all that shit and just get into the action – I daresay Riddick still has enough going on to keep you gripped. This really is an ‘ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it’ scenario, with monsters not unlike those from Pitch Black, but instead of ‘once it’s dark, we’re fucked,’ it’s now ‘once it starts raining, we’re fucked.’ There’s a nice balance of practical and CG, although the design of these new beasties isn’t perhaps as distinctive as those of Pitch Black – however, as Faraci also notes, these latest monsters are inescapably phallic…
It might be just a little too long and too oestentatious for its own good, but for the most part Riddick is a perfectly enjoyable B-movie romp. If Diesel and Twohy want to keep on churning these out once every five years or so, I’ll happily keep checking them out – though I won’t deny I’ll be keeping a close eye on the subtext the whole time.
Riddick is availble now on DVD, Blu-ray, download and on-demand services from Entertainment One.