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THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK by Tom McCurrie
That grand old storyteller Aesop once said that familiarity breeds contempt. But if he had checked out "The Chronicles of Riddick" at your friendly neighborhood multiplex, he would have come up with a new moral: familiarity breeds lame sequels.
(Warning: Spoilers Ahead!)
Actually, pegging "The Chronicles of Riddick" ("Riddick" for short) as familiar is totally unfair. After all, it's also incredibly confusing. Written and directed by David Twohy, "Riddick" continues the story of, obviously, Riddick (Vin Diesel), the bad-attitude space outlaw, whom we first saw fighting creepy, night-roaming monsters in "Pitch Black" (2000). This time around the monster is human (and much less frightening): someone called the Lord Marshal (Colm Feore, coming across like a mildly irritated headmaster), a combination of the Pope and Darth Vader who ravages planet after planet on his way to someplace called the Underverse. Initially, I thought the characters were saying Underwurst, making me believe the Lord Marshal was searching for some fabulous new kind of lunchmeat. According to an obtusely written prologue, Lord Marshal returned from this Underverse with freaky supernatural powers, and now he wants to lead his army of forced converts back to the UV for a second helping. But what is this Underverse? What are they all supposed to do when they get there? How did it give Lord Marshal his powers? Will it give his converts the same ones? And if it does, won't it be hard for L.M. to control his army when each buck private has the same powers he does? Because the villain's goal is so muddy, we're put in a state of confusion almost immediately, and that keeps "Riddick" at an emotional distance. After all, how can we hiss the villain (and thus root for the hero) when we really don't know why the baddie is doing what he's doing?
The structure only adds to the confusion. Riddick and Lord Marshal meet at the end of Act One (about thirty minutes in), so we're expecting a knock-down, drag-out battle between these guys over the course of Act Two, with the fate of the universe hanging in the balance. But Riddick bails on this fight-of-the-century to rescue a friend on a faraway prison planet, a plotline that has nothing to do with Lord Marshal and his desire to lay waste to the nearest available solar system. In fact, the Lord Marshal plotline practically disappears during Act Two, as Riddick fights his way in and out of the planetary prison. Now this prison sequence does have some suspenseful moments - the scene where Riddick and his fellow cons have to outrace the dawn or be cremated by daytime temps of 700 degrees-plus is a clever inversion of "Pitch Black" and by far the best part of the movie. Unfortunately, the shift in focus to the prison gives "Riddick" an episodic, meandering quality that pulls us out of the story; it's difficult to care what happens when the plot keeps changing like this. The prison plotline also has much lower stakes - Riddick's friend Kyra is in the slammer but her life isn't in any particular danger. On the other hand, the Lord Marshal plotline has real life-or-death stakes - if this guy isn't stopped, the universe is toast. The higher the stakes, the higher the suspense, and since life-or-death stakes are the highest there is, "Riddick" actually gets less suspenseful as it goes along, not a good thing if you want to keep your audience from sneaking next door to see "Shrek 2".
But even if we didn't have all the confusion and meandering, we'd still have the sense of deja vu that lies at the heart of "Riddick"'s problems. Almost everything in "Riddick" seems a homage (that's French for rip-off) of something else. And it isn't just the plot, either. The production design is a cross between "Alien" and "Dune" (the Lynch version, of course). The sound-wave blasters are much too similar to those in "Minority Report". Lord Marshal's ability to bend, twist and divide his own body during wild martial-arts combat is straight out of "The Matrix". And the massive invasion of Helion Prime by Lord Marshal's army is a pale imitation of the spectacular battles in "Star Wars - Episode II: Attack of the Clones". Of course, the screenplay is the real letdown: the megalomaniacal-villain-out-to-subjugate-the-universe-plot is a tired retread of everything from "Star Wars" to "The Lord of the Rings", the Lord Marshal seeking to annihilate the one race destined to defeat him is straight out of Herod and the Bible, while having the wife of Lord Marshal's second-in-command egging her husband on to seize power himself is Dinner Theatre "Macbeth" in funky, Star Trek garb. All this familiarity makes "Riddick" entirely predictable, a movie where you can see every plot turn and character arc ahead of time. And that gets very boring very quickly.
Now "Pitch Black" wasn't the most original plot, either (people shipwrecked on a nasty, monster-filled planet), but at least it had the hook of Riddick's night-vision-peepers. After having been used so thoroughly in "Pitch Black", however, this hook is obviously no longer fresh. But instead of coming up with something equally novel for the sequel, Twohy has Riddick take the baddie down with sheer physical force like a zillion other heroes in a zillion other movies.
So with a tip of the hat to Aesop, let me give you my own moral: Familiarity breeds a desire not to pay ten bucks to see "Riddick", but to wait till said flick hits cable.
Responses, comments and general two-cents worth can be E-mailed to
gillis662000@yahoo.com.
(Note: For all those who missed my past reviews, they're archived on Hollywoodlitsales.com. Just click the link on the main page and it'll
take you to the Inner Sanctum. Love them or Hate them at your leisure!)
A graduate of USC's School of Cinema-Television, Tom McCurrie has worked as a development executive and a story analyst. He is currently a screenwriter living in Los Angeles.
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