CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK, THE

Rating: 3

As THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK opens, Vin Diesel, playing the eponymous Riddick, is faced with impossible odds in a life-and-possibly-death situation. He prevails with a combination of strength, cunning, and attitude that is a lethal weapon in and of itself.  And there, boys and girls, is the film in a nutshell. Of course, it doesn’t end there. It continues on at a breakneck pace for another two hours or so. What he have here is the purest translation yet of pulp to the big screen. In the grand tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs Martian stories and Robert E. Howard’s Conan, it’s big, it’s cheesy, and it doesn’t let anything like logic or plot mar the proceedings. It’s good versus evil, or in this case, evil versus evil, boiled down to its bare essence.  You either like this sort of thing or you don’t, but if you like it, you will LOVE this.
Riddick, as you recall, was the anti-hero of PITCH BLACK, a tale about very, very nasty things that went bump in the very, very dark night of outer space. He’s back, weird glowing eyes and all, and this time the things don’t wait for the dark. They’re Necromongers, and they are the dark, in a manner of speaking.  They’re high on a new religion that promises paradise in something called the Underverse and those who don’t convert to this creed, a process that makes ritual circumcision pale in comparison, are killed. The leader, Lord Marshall (Colm Feore), has already been to the Underverse and it’s rendered him half alive and half something that not even the film’s residential elemental, the vaporous Aereon (Judy Dench), can put a name to.  Never mind. It’s just an excuse for the CGI folks to create a nifty whooshing effects when his Lordship decides to move faster than the human eye can follow. Just like the film as a whole is an excuse for Vin Diesel to flex his bodacious muscles by opening a can of serious whoop-ass on someone, something, or several someones and somethings every few minutes.  There was a time when I might has doubted that muscles would be enough to carry a film, but this guy has muscles that may generate their own gravitaion fields, and veins popping on them that are bigger than most people’s biceps. It barely skirts grotesque on its way to fascinating.
As for the story, it jumps all over the place, from the halcyon world of Helion, to the foreboding fortress of the Necros, as they’re called for short, to Crematoria, the prison planet with a sun that can flash fry you with one touch of its whiplash rays. There’s a dastardly plot to overthrow Lord Marshal by his second in command (Karl Urban) at the behest of his slinky Lady Macbeth of a gal pal (Thandie Newton. We also catch up with some of the folks from PITCH BLACK, including Jack now Kyra (Alexa Davalos), all grown up into a luscious and lethal woman, and one that is surprisingly well-kempt considering the life she’s led there on Crematoria. Again, never mind. The point is the series of episodes where metal weapons clang, firearms spew, and there is much manly grunting of he-men engaged in furious combat.
With a tale like this, it’s important to scale the visuals to the action, and I’m pleased to report that’s exactly what’s been done. There are the techno-Goth excesses of the Necros, with armor that mimics what’s under the skin, and towers that pierce the stratosphere. There’s Riddick and company outracing that pesky Crematorian sun as they make a break from the prison across a lava field that stretches towards a seemingly endless horizon.  And where would a film like this be without pronouncements like “Don’t step up if you can’t keep up or you’ll die” or Riddick taking out a very large opponent with a tea cup?
Writer/director David Twohy keeps the action tight while taking into consideration the shortcomings of his star (and co-producer). He indulges the excesses of the pulp genre without collapsing the preciousness of the idiom into a self-inflated, and unintentional, parody. Sure, there are a few unintentional laughs, when Kyra tells Riddick that she knows by the change in his expression what he’s thinking of doing, for example. Diesel is fun here, but he’s got the one expression and that’s it. Fortunately, he is rarely asked to do more than he can deliver. He doesn’t act, he poses, and he doesn’t declaim, he growls.
THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK is a Frazetta painting come to rumbly life, albeit with the women actually covered up, and is just about as deep, despite earnest attempts to the contrary. Fear not, though, Newton spends her time on screen in a series of form-fitting lizard-skin gowns. There’s no doubt that Diesel and company are eyeing this as a franchise opportunity, and given the choice between this and another excursion into Freddy and/or Jason land, we could do worse.