Review: ‘Riddick’

Guys! Hey, guys! Guess what? Riddick isn’t awful!

In fact, it’s pretty damn entertaining.

The film opens with Riddick (Vin Diesel), lying half-dead on the barren wasteland of whatever planet he’s on. He wakes up and is soon in a struggle fighting for his life between animal hybrids like a zebra/dog and some snake/scorpion that wants nothing more than to swallow him up whole.

And this is where it gets interesting. Because for these first 40 minutes, it’s all diesel on screen. Save for a couple minutes of backstory, Diesel is all on his own, battling predators and outwitting them.

And besides the awful voice over throughout this first part, it’s darn good.

The story then shifts to two sets of bounty hunters who come to the planet in search of our anti-hero and during this portion of the film, he’s barely on-screen. He’s playing cat and mouse with them but he’s more of a ghost, leaving clues of his existence behind.

How many times in a major action film does the lead virtually disappear for 35 minutes? None that I can recall. I mean, the balls writer/Director David Twohy and Diesel have to do that. What if it didn’t work? Well, no worries because it does. It becomes almost another movie and twists us into rooting for them and Riddick at the same time.

Not that you have too much time to root for any one person because as the third act starts, they have to team up to battle yet another evil.

Yes, there are some major cheese to some of the parts; the voice over like I said earlier and a couple of the special effects shots look like a high school student made it on his laptop. And during the backstory part, I honestly had no idea what was happening but honestly, I didn’t care one bit.