Short Round: The Chronicles of Riddick (2004) **/*****
The Chronicles of Riddick — the second chapter of Riddick’s adventures that director David Twohy and star Vin Diesel collaborated on — is decidedly grander in scale and more complex in conception than its predecessor, Pitch Black, and it’s the worse for it in almost every way imaginable. This time around we’re not getting a simple creature feature. Instead, we’re watching as Riddick (Diesel) gets caught up in an epic fantasy tale that involves multiple worlds, vast armies, various kinds of supernatural beings, ancient prophesies, and who knows how many other things I’m forgetting. Pitch Black worked because Riddick was a cool character and it was fun to watch him be a badass. The Chronicles of Riddick, in comparison, throws so much plot and exposition at us that it feels like sitting through a boring history lesson. Instead of being a brainless action movie, it’s homework, and nobody likes to get homework.
The good thing about the film is that Twohy and company clearly got a lot more money to work with this time, so many of the alien landscapes and over the top action sequences are better realized and more dazzling than they were in Pitch Black — but even this only goes so far. Twohy tries to push things so far that he once again surpasses his capabilities and ends up having to fill his film with so many cheap-looking sets and fake-looking costumes in order to build so many alien cities and to outfit so many hordes of extras, that TCOR starts to, at times, look like a genre film that’s decades older than it actually is, or maybe even something that was made to go straight to video. The mixing of grand, impressive visuals and low budget, throwback effects is jarring.
And though Diesel is just as charming, Riddick is just as badass, and just as many people gloriously die here as they did in Pitch Black, this time around everything gets drown in too much boring exposition for it to have the same effect. Why is a deadly criminal like Riddick hanging out in worlds that look like they’d be better suited to space Indiana Jones or space He-Man anyway? He’s the sort of dude who should be in space biker bars, space prisons, or space whore houses. This was just a really strange, ineffective approach to broadening the universe we were introduced to in Pitch Black, and it results in a two hour movie that ends up feeling like it’s three.
