The Chronicles of Riddick (2004) – Film Review

Director: David Twohy
Cast: Vin Diesel, Thandiwe Newton, Colm Feore
Certificate: 15

By Roger Crow

When Pitch Black became a sleeper hit in 2000, it not only turned Vin Diesel into a star, but gave jobbing writer/director David Twohy one of the biggest hits of his career. A sequel was inevitable as Richard B Riddick was such a cool anti-hero; a bald ex-con who could see in the dark and had a voice that sounded like he gargled gravel. Universal gave Twohy a massive budget, so by 2004, Diesel’s character was everywhere.

The not-bad video game Escape From Butcher Bay kept me entertained for hours, while an anime saga also boosted the fan base. The standout was of course The Chronicles of Riddick, which boasted some of the best sets and production design of any sci-fi movie in that era. Take a bow production designer Holger Gross and costume wizard Ellen Mirojnick.

The story involved our very hirsute hero on the run from a bunch of bounty hunters. He winds up on a planet that looks like Morocco where an old associate (Keith David) from Pitch Black offers news of their fellow survivor from film one, Jack (this time played by Alexa Davalos).

“A beautiful smile”

The planet is invaded by Necromongers, half-dead alien warriors who wear impressive clunky armour and fly spaceships that look like gothic tombstones.

Thrown into the mix is Judi Dench as a diaphanous alien, who looks like she wandered in from a different movie, but has a beautiful smile usually reserved for actors getting paid phone number-style salaries for appearing in stuff that is beneath them. Colm Feore, who later popped up in Thor, is the head of the bad guys, while solid support comes from Linus Roache (son of William ‘Ken Barlow’ Roache) as a bad guy with a secret.

Anyway, in easily the best sequence, Riddick (shorn of most of his hair) winds up on Crematoria, a prison planet where the sunrise is so fierce, it turns the landscape into melted rock, and living beings into toast. There he attempts to rescue Jack, now called Kyra, and escape from a bunch of ‘mercs’ and Russian bad guys by outrunning the sunrise. Again the sets are phenomenal and in 4K UHD, the textures are so detailed you can almost touch them. Nice to see a film which had so much detail in its costumes and sets finally given the home entertainment standard it deserved 20 years ago.

If you’re a fan of Dune or European comics artist Philippe Druillet (who influenced the last Dune movie), then this is a feast for the eyes if not the brain. The sweeping sci-fi space opera wanted to be something as good as Dune, with Macbeth-style overtones (Thandiwe Newton has a ball as a scheming Lady Macbeth-style character), and though it doesn’t quite come off, as it takes itself far too seriously, full marks for effort.

“Real star”

It also boasts one of the worst lines of dialogue in sci-fi cinema over the last two decades as Riddick letches over Dame Vaako (Newton): “It’s a long time since I smelled beautiful.”

Karl Urban, one of fantasy film and TV’s greatest assets, is also rather good in support, and some of the CG still looks surprisingly good, while other bits, less so.

The real star is of course Diesel, who looks great from any angle, and sounds just as good. Just a shame the script wasn’t given as much polish as some of the sets.

I’m surprised how much I enjoyed it on this third or fourth viewing, because while it’s not as lean, mean and effective as Pitch Black, it’s also not as cheap and mean-spirited as the third film, Riddick, which was released in 2013. The real gem with this new release is an hour-plus feature on the movie featuring some of the geniuses who put it together. No sign of Diesel alas, but David Twohy has some excellent nuggets of trivia about how the film was constructed, and the fact his face was used for the knight on the Necromongers’ crashing spaceship.

“Infectious laugh”

One matte painter with perfect teeth and an infectious laugh reveals how he put his initials on one of the jaw-dropping matte paintings, and Keith David wanted his character to take on an Obi-Wan Kenobi-like presence. There’s also a Londoner in a flat cap who frankly deserved an Oscar for his work on the effects. Linus Roache also has some fabulous memories, such as the Riddick reshoots that messed up his hair for Batman Begins.

Naturally, everybody gushes over working with Judi Dench, though York’s finest thesp doesn’t make an appearance, and the cast and crew are refreshingly honest about the movie’s reception. Okay, it wasn’t a blockbuster, but at least Twohy delivered something with more scope than just Pitch Black 2, which the studio apparently wanted to be a rehash of film one. There’s also a hint from Twohy about a fourth Riddick movie, so let’s hope he and Diesel make that sooner rather than later.