Review of Riddick (2013) by Harry W — 24 Mar 2014

Although in my opinion Pitch Black had sucked, I found that The Chronicles of Riddick was alright so I figured I should see the last film in the trilogy and determine my opinion of the series on the basis of the last film Riddick which is was more positively received by critics than both of its predecessors.

Although I enjoyed The Chronicles of Riddick, it felt like an overblown feature which spent too much on visual effects and not enough on anything else. So considering that Riddick has a reasonably low budget, it is good to see the series taking a step back and relying on good filmmaking instead of solely on big budget visuals. Although even with a low budget Riddick manages to make use of good visual effects without being excessively reliant on them. It uses them in moderation well against the backdrop of its strong and convincing scenery. I mean, the visuals aren't perfect, but they're good enough to pass, and when they combine with the scenery they help to build Riddick up as a good visual experience.

The fact that Riddick goes back to basics is both a positive and negative aspect of the film. It's negative because it means that the amount of entertaining activity on screen is limited and therefore the pace of the film is slow, but its positive because it shows off just what director David Twohy can do with a low budget, and what he does is better than what he did for Pitch Black. While Riddick isn't the best as an example of storytelling because it feels like a rehash of the plot in Pitch Black, it surpasses the quality of that film in terms of technical elements mostly.

Riddick is appealing from a visual perspective for the aforementioned reasons, and because it is lit well enough so that viewers can see everything in the spectrum while also embracing the dark atmosphere of the film without having the visual elements embalmed in excessive darkness. I mean it is dark, but it's the perfect kind of dark so that viewers can still see everything well, so Riddick succeeds at achieving what Pitch Black was unable to do. So it is clear that the sensible intelligence of David Twohy as a filmmaker has grown over time and he has learned to make his series of films about Richard B. Riddick better, because Riddick was a fairly satisfying science fiction action film overall and it did a lot within certain budgetary constraints.

Surprisinngly enough, Riddick has plenty of entertaining action. While remaining on a small scale and never attempting to go epic or too big, the action scenes in Riddick are very entertaining. They harness the quality of the powerful visual effects and implore in plenty of blood and gore without succumbing to shaky cinematography and excessively quick editing. In actual fact, the action scenes in Riddick boast the quality of extended shots with fine cinematography which is very smooth and minimal yet well timed editing. And the sound effects are very powerful without being excessively loud or repetitive, so everything feels really convincing and therefore entertaining.

Frankly, considering the story and the style of the action, Riddick proves to be a very small scale science fiction action thriller story which fits largely into the survival genre as it covers Riddick on his journey to survive a planet with a lot of threatening beings coming after him, and while it faces the slow pacing that generally comes with a film of such a genre, it proves to be mostly effective even with a few problems.

There is little dialogue in Riddick, but admittedly it really isn't well written language and is pretty generic. I mean, you can't expect it to have sufficient character development in it or many characters to really boast for the actors to work with, but what little dialogue there is proves to be fairly weak and insufficient. And the plot is no better in how its written because while the film itself is not excessively reliant on expensive visual aids, the story seems to be because it doesn't give much for the film to do within a fairly thin and basic context. The story doesn't try hard, and I guess that's ok because the story in The Chronicles of Riddick was a bit overblown, but clever writing never hurt a film. I guess there really isn't many opportunities for it in Riddick, so don't look for surprises.

Still, Riddick boasts a decent cast as well.

Vin Diesel's performance is ok. The character Richard B. Riddick isn't the strongest one, and he doesn't exactly interact with the computer generated creatures of the world too realistically so it's not exactly Vin Diesel's finest hour. But Vin Diesel delivers essentially everything required for the role. The character Richard B. Riddick is essentially a generic science fiction action thriller tough guy, and that's exactly what Vin Diesel characterises him. He interacts with the other actors well and gives off a sense that he really does know what he is doing, so as the titular character in Riddick, Vin Diesel delivers the necessary goods to get by. It doesn't match up to his finer performances, but it's surely his best performance as the titular character Richard B. Riddick.

And while the supporting performances really aren't too much to boast about as the other characters in Riddick are more paper thin in writing than the titular figure, the efforts of Matthew Nable, Jordi Molla and Katee Sackhoff contribute their parts to making Riddick a better film. Katee Sackhoff is especially a genial presence because of her worldwide recognition for her performance as Captain Kara "Starbuck" Thrace in the long running science fiction series Battlestar Galactica.

Frankly, Riddick is not a great film. But on a low budget it uses some great visual effects infused with a lot of other positive technical characteristics to make it the film that Pitch Black should have been, thus giving a decent conclusion to a mixed-quality trilogy of films.