It takes awhile for Riddick to get its footing with the first 30 minutes feeling oddly like a morbid, futuristic Discovery Channel show with little dialogue and Riddick frolicking around a deserted planet with an awful CGI tiger and fighting random snake-like creatures. After the plodding intro, Riddick picks up the pace once two teams of bounty hunters come to the abandoned planet and try to hunt down Riddick for a giant cash reward. Riddick's biggest triumph is bringing the series back to its roots with an R-rating. The Chronicles of Riddick was a high-budget, watered-down PG-13 film that ended up being pretty underwhelming. Without the restrictions of a PG-13 rating, this film brings back the gore (one standout scene features one of the best machete kills in the history of film)and subsequently makes the series fun again. When you start a series with intense, bloody action it needs to stay the way and I'm glad the filmmakers decided to bring heavy gore back into the fold this time around.
This film also sees far more of an injection of energy into the role of Riddick for Vin Diesel. He went to great lengths for this film to be made (he exchanged a cameo appearance in Fast Furious: Tokyo Drift for the rights to this franchise and funded a majority of this himself) and it shows with his added dedication to the character. Writer/director David Twhoy gave Riddick more depth and made him more leathal and Diesel just rolls with it, giving the character more mystique than it past and even adding a bit of sympathy for him as well. I commend Diesel for putting in the extra effort into getting this film made and not letting the series conclude on the low that was The Chronicles of Riddick. In the end, Riddick is a relatively satisfying albeit straightforward sc-fi action film that serves as a nice, bloody holdover before the more thought-provoking fare of the fall hits.
3/5 Stars
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