Review of Riddick (2013) by Maksim B — 16 Jan 2014

Similar in visual style and story content to Pitch Black, Riddick is a most welcome return to the roots of the franchise which brought Vin Diesel to Hollywood stardom. Not as original and cult as the first movie, the third installment is certainly a movie which would erase the awful memories from the disastrous The Chronicle of Riddick and will provide more of what made Pitch Black a cult movie: simple story, lonely planet, pure sci-fi action and a back-to-basics-Vin-Diesel.

Riddick should have been the natural sequel to the franchise's starter Pitch Black. The main plot is similar, the settings are familiar, the planet has different aliens and specifics but the context of being on a nasty place remains and finally the sub-plot is directly related to the first movie. Once again the super-cool-bad-ass Riddick (Vin Diesel) find himself on an unfriendly planet where surviving is probable in the short term, but impossible in the long one. Being alone, he decides to let the bounty hunters looking for him know where he is, so that he could eventually find his way out of the planet. Soon a cat-and-mouse game is started, in hunters become hunted but the real enemy is yet to approach.

The inevitable comparison with the other two movies is inevitable. While Riddick scores much better than The Chronicles of Riddick, it does not much the level of Pitch Black due to two reasons. By providing more of what made Pitch Black a cult movie, director David Twohy has limited himself in framework which fails to surprise. Secondly, the second half of the movie is definitely the weaker one as the story is slowed down by unnecessary shallow dialogues and excessive "human presence".

Despite these flaws, director Twohy has definitely provided a third movie filled with satisfying violence and the cool presence of Vin Diesel. The fans of the franchise would be pleased to see this delivery being closer to the original, while for the neutral audiences Riddick would be a boring and almost watchable B-sci-fi movie. If you enjoyed Pitch Black, give it a try, if you did not - skip it.