Review of The Chronicles of Riddick (2004) by Eric N — 12 Apr 2010

If you're intrigued enough by Pitch Black, check it out, but Pitch Black was much smaller and much better. Oh and if you haven't seen that, DO IT!

This movie is sweet eye-candy but no nutritional value for the brain - leaves your stomach pretty hollow. Here's hoping for another movie though because he's one of the most interesting characters to come out of the 2000s.

They certainly tried. You can really feel it. Unlike most hollywood movies, there is personal aristic love in this movie. The sound and visuals are outstanding. The acting is good too. The story started out interesting. Then it got slower (but that's ok, sometimes). Great setpieces though. They tried to make this a monumental epic movie, but it's only a epic B-movie.

Because by the end I stopped caring. It was a 5-star movie at the start, then it looked like it could be only 4 maybe in the middle for me with the fantasy elements. Plot-wise, the last 1/4 really lost me in a huge way. Like "Sunshine" bad. When the ending is the weakest part, the movie is brought down so much more than if it had been a bad start or bad middle. They just didn't build it up. The movie kinda went on and got slower if anything. I saw the director's cut so maybe the original is a little bit tighter and that might help especially with that ending.

To sum up: the action & sci-fi fx blew me away but I hoped for way more in the story department. If only there were more characters to care about instead of just different levels of anti-hero and villain, I would've been emotionally invested in the story at the end and we would've had a killer movie here.