Review of Riddick (2013) by Joe A — 11 Sep 2014

Literally the first half hour is nothing but Riddick wounded in the desert fighting off a few different types of creatures. He manages to fight them off (usually with a conveniently placed giant bone nearby). He captures and domesticates a dog-like creature that looks like a cartoon. I just recapped the entire first quarter of this movie for you. The first 30 minutes could and should have been cut down to about 10 minutes or so. It's like if you were watching the movie 300 and they took 1/4 of the film to show Leonidas as a child training to fight and kill the wolf. It was just unnecessarily long and all it did was explain how he got his dog and learn to fight the creatures (which I don't think was even that important to establish).

It gets slightly better from there, but not by much. A cast of human actors finally arrive to hunt down Riddick and we have some semblance of a movie plot.

The rest of the movie is just barely watchable. It's filled with dumb action, bad special effects, pointless nudity, terrible dialogue, and mediocre acting. Some of it was so bad that it was funny. For instance, there's a part where Riddick is riding on a hovering motorcycle. He jumps it over a pit full of creatures in slow motion, but for some unknown reason he does this Superman motocross type of stunt maneuver. Why? No reason. Probably the director said "Hey! Wouldn't it be cool if we threw this in there?". Well, it wasn't cool - it was laughably bad.

Bottom line: Riddick is dumb. I've seen much worse, but I'd still advise you not to waste your time on it.