THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK (2004) Fractured and misconceived Like Alien Vs. Predator, I really wanted to like this one, and like Alien Vs. Predator, that PG-13 rating gave me pause. It's not as problematic here; Pitch Black was rated R but it was a pretty light R. The "unrated" cut released on video adds nothing that would've given it a stricter rating than the PG-13, and I harbor no hopes for AVP doing it either. The central problem of the movie with the pretentious-as-fuck title The Chronicles Of Riddick is this: it's not one movie, it's two movies. One good, one bad, and it's the bad one that star Vin Diesel and writer/director David Twohy seem to have made intentionally. One of them said they wanted this to be "the evil Star Wars". If only. I'm glad to see Riddick's return - he's easily the most interesting space opera hero of the new millennium so far, not that he's had a lot to compete against. But he deserves a better movie than this. The good movie isn't original or very forward-thinking, but like Pitch Black it's fun, unsentimental, it looks great, and has a winning tone that lets the viewer take danger to its characters seriously - even the non-lethal fight between Riddick and "Jack", the now-grown (and much-hardened) girl who'd avoided trouble in the first movie by dressing as a boy during interstellar trips, shows them fighting like they mean it and actually draws a little blood at one point. Riddick is on the run from mercenaries (led by Toombs, as played by Nick Chinlund, who walks away with every scene he's in and if there are further Riddick movies I hope he's featured prominently) and ends up having to rescue the very person he's been trying to protect by avoiding, "Jack", now played by Alexa Davalos. This story has pretty much everything I was looking for from this movie. A couple of cool planets, like the scorched (and aptly-named) prison planet Crematoria, and a snow planet whose surface is ridged like a big giant fingerprint. An excellent reconstruction/update on Star Wars' "rusty, dented" futurism. Fun characters (did I mention Toombs rules?), funny dialogue ("I'm gonna kill you...with my teacup."), a couple of neat critters (CGI could've been better), no space battles, and Riddick being his bad-assed self from whom acts of altruism actually mean something, instead of the stock, cheap, easy heroics we take for granted from anyone in Starfleet. I actually liked the hilariously absurd sequence where Riddick and company have to outrun the sun (!) and have to hide in the shade to avoid its planet-frying heat - ridiculous, sure, but it was fun to watch. But one thing I didn't like at all about these sequences though: frequent, fanboy-tickling lifting of dialogue, word for word, entire conversations sometimes, from the first movie. It worked great...in the first movie. Here it's achingly contrived and each time, lifted me right out of the movie, making me feel pandered to like Jar-Jar Binks never prepared me for. The bad movie in The Chronicles Of Riddick, however, is where most of the movie's problems come from. Twohy speaks much of "mythmaking" when referencing what he was trying to do here. I can't say it any more clearly: what most people call "mythmaking", is nothing more than a recycling of stories and characters that have been exhausted for hundreds, even thousands of years. One might argue for a "timeless" quality for these things, but that's just a nice way of saying they're clichés. The Necromongers are an army led by one Lord Marshall (Colm Feore, great actor, totally wasted here) who has "been to the gates of the Underverse" and came back "something half man, half...something else". Just what the Underverse is, is not explicitly addressed, but it's probably significant that it isn't called the Oververse, if you know what I mean. The Necromongers follow him with fanatical devotion, and follow a code that says what you kill, you keep - and even the dumbest people in the audience surely must have figured out the ending of this movie by now. Their aim is to either convert the rest of humanity to their religion, or kill them, which they do planet by planet and nobody's been able to stop them, not even Judi Dench (also a great actor, with a little more to work with than Feore) as an air elemental, the only non-human intelligence so far seen in the Pitch Black universe. Dench isn't here for much other than to give us some exposition, but to my knowledge she's never played an alien before and she does bring the appropriate sense of wisdom and serenity to the role. Sounds okay so far, nothing more. But then they throw in an ambitious Necromonger lieutenant (Karl Urban) and his totally Lady Macbeth wife (Thandie Newton), some wire-fu fights, climactic single combat (which, at least, finally gives us a nice demonstration of how Lord Marshall's "something else" half works), and worst of all - great Lucifer's beard, I wish I was making this up - the revelation that Riddick is the Prophecied Chosen One who will Avenge His People by Defeating Their Nemesis. Here we are in 2004 and people are still making movies where characters are the Prophecied Chosen One who will Avenge His People by Defeating Their Nemesis (a little late to Deliver Them From Bondage)? Kill me. Kill me dead. The Necromongers' ships have a prettily cold interior design to them, seemingly using gravity-based weapons and ship propulsion, and I appreciated the overt sexuality of slinky, tonguey Newton, this kind of movie of course being famous for its sexlessness. Aside from that - the Necromongers aren't very frightening to behold (their armor is ridiculously bulky), and two characters are able to resist their obviously sophisticated brainwashing late in the movie, though if such resistance was even remotely likely you'd think they'd have steps in place to keep new recruits out of stabbing distance from their leader. As planet-destroying mega-villains, the Necromongers have some high standards to aspire to (most recently, probably the Borg) and aren't very impressive at all. There's so much to rethink, beyond the obvious problems of budget and rating, to make a third Riddick movie worthwhile. This nonsense about a "mythology" absolutely must be abandoned in favor of something, y'know, creative. At the very least, stop quoting the previous movies. Diesel himself has said that a third Riddick movie should have a lower budget and be rated R (though he mentioned nothing about being willing to take the necessary pay cut); that movie would, I hope, be much more like the more personal, visceral scenes with the mercs and the prison planet than the attempts at being "epic". If you're looking for the evil Star Wars, one can only hope Revenge Of The Sith delivers on that score. BACK TO THE C's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE