Riddick is fun. Riddick is dumb. That's all there really is to say about it.
Riddick opens up with him buried alive and narrating that too many people have written him off for dead. He has ended up near dead on a very inhospitable planet. When we last left him, he was in charge of a world and at a constant threat of assassination. So he leaves that world in search of his homeworld. He is betrayed and is marooned on the planet. He finds a bounty hunters' outpost and puts out a beacon to let the hunters know he is there so he will be able to get off the planet. Some very unsavory ones come looking for him and begin to hunt him. Then a second set of much more professional hunters land. It turns out the leader was the father of the bounty hunter in the original (and much more superior) film Pitch Black. Like Pitch Black, it turns out there are some horrible animals that live on the world. Riddick sabotages the ships so he can bargain his way off world. Various bad guys die and Riddick gets away in an open-ended finish. The end.
Riddick is entertaining, but is not very substantial. It's too bad, too, because the original, Pitch Black, showed such promise. Pitch Black is Exhibit A on how to make a low budget movie look much bigger. It uses clever tricks to make the most of sparse terrain. Since most of it takes place at night, it also covers a multitude of sins with bad special effects. Riddick is also an interesting character, a vicious killer with an honor streak a mile wide. The second film, The Chronicles of Riddick, suffers from what I call sequelitis, the tendency of the film industry to make the second film bigger in every way. Pitch Black is a good, intimate little film. The Chronicles of Riddick becomes ridiculously overblown. Riddick tries to reboot the franchise at that smaller level. Unfortunately, it is not particularly great. It is fun to watch, totally predictable and a little confusing and anticlimactic. The high point of the film is that Katee Sackoff (Starbuck on the new Battlestar Galactica series) does a totally gratuitous topless scene, so this should give you an idea of its quality. So if you want a turn-brain-off film, it's worth the time. It is unfortunate, though, that a good Riddick film, for some reason, eludes the capability of most filmmakers. Riddick is a very interesting character, and it is almost criminal that so many opportunities have been wasted, especially since Fast and the Furious has five bad sequels to a bad movie.
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