Review of Riddick (2013) by Trevor M — 15 Jan 2014

If you want to watch Vin Diesel show off how abysmal an actor he really is deep down and waste 2 hours of your life being disappointed and utterly confused, Riddick is the movie for you! Unless you re-watched The Chronicles of Riddick immediately before watching this movie, you will have no clue what is going on, and even if you did, you will still be confused and hate this movie.

- Details Breakdown -.

The Good: There are most certainly some great badass Diehard moments in this movie. Riddick is going around stalking people and picking them off one by one in fun ways and stirring up trouble between the two mercenary factions that are competing for his head in a box. Although none of the names of the mercenaries are impossible to remember except for one or two, the writers did a good job at making them all distinct enough that they are memorable enough to not just be victims for Riddick to toy with. The movie is an interesting almost re-birth of Riddick as a character, which makes this movie a sort of re-origins story.

The Bad: I honestly have not seen the previous movie since it was released, which was a decade ago, and so maybe my hazy memory made this movie less enjoyable than if it were fresh in my mind, but the studio really should have thought about that and not tried to release a sequel 10 years after the original. The decade gap could have been forgiven, except for the fact that they do not even remind the audience what happened last time and even worse, they actually build on it and expect everyone to remember every little detail. If you're going to set out to re-create a character, do not spend the whole movie referencing plot points from the first movie that no one remembers. Riddick shows like no other movie has shown before, how crappy of an actor Vin Diesel is. We can forgive him for the Fast and the Furious movies since there is little acting to be done there anyway, but good lord he is the most boring action star to be stuck with for 2 freakin hours. He is monotone and always serious to the point that he does not feel like a person. He is basically The Terminator and might as well be a robot. The first half of the movie is completely pointless and is basically "let's watch Vin Diesel fight random CGI monsters for an hour". Once the mercenaries show up and he starts picking them off one by one, things finally pick up a bit, but even that is not as awesome as it should be. He is rarely seen actually doing anything, mercenaries just disappear into the night. Then there is the fact that he totally creeps on Starbuck from BSG as she is naked in the shower while we get a creeper shot of her boobs while he slowly reaches his hand towards her. There are actually a lot of boobs in this movie and it feels like the director said to himself, "this movie is the worst action movie ever, let's add some naked women and maybe people will watch it". Shame on you, David Can'tPronounceYourLastName. Also, I do not understand how Riddick is such a badass. He is the slowest moving action hero in existence and his sole strategy seems to involve standing still and then punching people really hard when they get close. The flashback scenes in this movie that are supposed to lend clarity to the story simply make it more confusing and the ending is equally confusing. Riddick should have just been on that stupid planet the whole movie and at least it would have been a survival movie instead of whatever the heck they turned it into. On a final note, Karl Urban is an amazing actor and the director turned his character into a steaming pile of crap. Good job, good job.