“Riddick”
Directed by David Twohy
Starring Vin Diesel, Jordi Mollà, Matt Nable, Katee Sackhoff, Dave Bautista, Bokeem Woodbine, Raoul Trujilo
Action, Sci-Fi, Thriller
119 Mins
R

Vin Diesel possesses some uncanny voodoo that allows him to be a bad actor who people excuse for bad acting. His smarmy tough guys are marked by a well-measured dose of self-awareness, sometimes so third-wall breaking that they almost plays as cutesy – like a shaven-headed, muscle-bound Ferris Bueller. He tries to make us laugh with him, not at him, and for the most part, it works. Even in Riddick, which is no doubt a bad movie, his oily glances and meat-and-potatoes asides work to entangle us in this world, trying to lift the pulped story from the screenwriters trash bin where it belongs. But even Diesel’s ‘hardy hars’ can’t salvage a plot that’s so disjointed and thrown together it feels more like a violent mosaic than an actual movie.

Complying to the traditional three arc tango just was not the right play here, as this metaphorical pigsty of a film is essentially three movies crammed into the same two hour runmtime.The first act is Riddick – battleworn loner stranded on hostile alien planet. Here, straggling baby dragons, working up an immunity to enlarged scorpion’s venom and montaging his way towards a space station in hopes of rescue at least give the character some semblance of purpose.

While I’ll admit to having missed the first two installments in the Riddick franchise, this first act gave me a sense of the shell-hardened ruffian on screen in addition to the sun-baked world on which he’s stranded, with all its creeper crawlers scurrying to-and-fro. There was a sense of stakes behind this action – a survival of the fittest joust between man and beast. But the sense of meaning that this opening scenario presented was quickly dissolved entirely from the film into a mindless boggle of soldier’s hoorahs, asinine body counts and ugly sexism.

The second act is an us-vs-them skirmish between Riddick and a band of mercs who’ve just touched down on the unnamed planet’s surface to hunt down Riddick and collection on his insurmountable bounty. While it serves to develop a new set of characters, it is pretty much entirely absent of the titular antihero. He lingers in the shadow, proving his worth as a cold-blooded murderer while we meet a crew of meat heads with little to no appeal.

Katee Sackhoff‘s Dahl is the most interesting of the crew but having a strong female lead in this sci-fi actioner seems more like cannon fodder than progress. You’ll see what I mean shortly. The only other character worthy of mention is Johns (Matt Nable). He’s the father of one Little Johns (apparently a character in an earlier film) and the only part of the crew who’s mind isn’t eternally gutter bound. An inkling of a common thread is woven between Johns and Riddick but it’s not nearly as meaningful as the film supposes it is. “You’re son was spineless,” Riddick says to Johns, “like father like son.” As you may guess, the growing consternation between the two leads to a macho-a-thon between the buff dudes, each trying to one-up the other’s slo-mo feats of alien-slaying.

Finally we get to the third act, which amazingly enough, is the only portion featured in the trailers that you may have seen. That’s right, the sequence of a captured Riddick comes in the final act of the film. But again, it feels like an entirely different movie at that point so why bother trying to sell the movie as an entire package? Hell, just pick out your favorite act and make a trailer for that because that’s what the marketing crew seemed to do.

David Twohy, director of Pitch Black and Chronicles of Riddick, returns to direct a screenplay from Oliver Butcher and Stephen Cornwell (Unknown) so stuffed with sexual repugnance that it’s astonishing. Sackhoff plays the one female character with a name and her sexual preference for other women is so often degraded that the lack of comfort created feels like a sitting down and listening to one of grandma’s racist stories (but she’s old so we let it slide there.) Constant threats to rape a lesbian are unsettling – not to mention unnecessary. And aside from creating that rapey-vibe that is so popular in the movies these days, it’s just pure bizarre. Surely, the threat to go “balls deep” in her was played for a laugh but, geez, it was quite a dropping of the proverbial ball. I’m no arbiter of political correctness but the line in the sand is certainly crossed here mostly because we feel little more than uncomfortable watching it. We want to turn to the woman next to us in the theater and point out that we’re not laughing. “Excuse me ma’am, just wanted to point out that I’m not chuckling at all the gang rape jokes.”

While it’s hard enough to recover from a fumble of that degree, the story deadends so abruptly and severely that your head is left spinning. It’s hard to think of a movie in recent history with such a nonsensical, truncated conclusion. Literally everything leading up to it suggested one thing and then, just for the hell of it, the tracks shift and we’re left with a wildly different conclusion than we could have ever imagined. Earned twist this is not, as there is not one shred of evidence suggesting anything that could be confused for coherency is at play in the final five minutes.

You have to stick the ending. It’s the lynch-pin of the entire film. Unknowingly, Twohy must have mistaken “stick” for “skewer” as his conclusion is as half-baked as a no-bake cookie. That’s right, it’s so half-baked that it ain’t even baked at all. Running full speed into a brick wall, Riddick exits on the least graceful of notes. Aiming for resolution, the film seems to say, “We ran out of movie. Fin.”

On a technical side, Riddick achieves some minor level of potency. The scorched cinematography from David Eggby (Mad Max) actually looks pretty good considering the limited budget, particularly in the expansive sprawl of the first act. Original music from Graeme Revell thumps and pounds along, giving a backbone to the piece but disappearing entirely from our minds the minute the credit roll stops. But the real star of the film is Riddick’s weapon of choice – the bone saw. And by bone saw, I mean a bone that’s been crafted into a jagged-edge switchblade. So at least there’s that.

With reckless abandon, Twohy throws too much at the screen, desperately hoping for it all to stick. Fortunately for him, some of it does. There’s enough absurdity to cull some chuckles, a handful of interesting action beats, and a pet tiger-dog that is surely the audience’s favorite character. But so much is constantly sliding down off the wall that we’re left with a big pile of goop that doesn’t add up to much. Without a doubt, Riddick is B-movie territory but it’s handled with direct-to-video finesse.