Film Friday: Riddick (2013)

I’m a huge fan of Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick. Though different, both are excellent. I love Vin Diesel too. Hence, I had a lot of hope for Riddick, the third in the series. Unfortunately, try as I might, I just can’t like this film and I’m not surprised the film bombed badly.

The Plot

Before I outline the plot of Riddick, it’s worth revisiting the prior two films. Although both were written and directed by the same man, David Twohy, and both star the same actor playing the same character, they are remarkably different films. Pitch Black is more traditional science fiction with a narrow story taking place in a confined area. It is a character study as a handful of stranded characters struggle against an enemy that exists only in science fiction – a flock of blood-drinking, flying creatures who live in the dark, with the first half involving discovery of the creatures and the second half escape. This story was well written, well acted, well shot, and all around created a truly immersive experience for the audience, who had no problems believing what they were seeing.

The Chronicles of Riddick, by comparison, was a much more expansive tale. This one involved a marauding army of religious fanatics who want to wipe out or convert every non-believer the universe, and they do it by destroying planets. In this story, Riddick travels to multiple planets, engages in any number of fights or battle scenes, and ultimately destroys or saves millions of people. There is little introspection, no mystery, and less science fiction than action. Nevertheless, this film too was well shot, well acted and well written, and the result was a different but nearly equally enjoyable film.

As these two films were so different, the question became: would Riddick be more like Chronicles or more like Pitch Black, or would it be something else entirely?

Well, the story opens with Riddick getting betrayed by the Necromonger army he conquered at the end of Chronicles. He finds himself stranded on a desolate, hostile planet as a result. At first, he works to heal his significant wounds and master his environment. He befriends a dog creature. Then he essentially summons mercenaries (bounty hunters) to the planet so he can escape. Two different groups arrive, and when they do, Riddick warns them to flee, but to leave him one of the ships.

Naturally, they refuse.

From there, the film turns into a three-way struggle as the two groups of bounty hunters compete to get Riddick for their own reasons and Riddick works to eliminate them so he can take one of the ships and leave... at least until they realize that a storm is coming and once the storm comes, blood-sucking creatures who live in the rain will come try to kill them. Sound familiar?

Why This Film Didn’t Work

On the surface, I should have loved this film. The story itself was well written, the design of the film is excellent, and it was all well shot. Diesel remains an excellent actor and Riddick remains an excellent character. Yet, somehow, the more I watched this film, the less I liked it. And by the time the ending came, I really had come to dislike this film. But why?

I think the ultimate answer to why I didn’t like this film was that it felt like a cliche of the entire franchise. No new ground was broken anywhere and, to the contrary, everything you saw was stolen from one of the prior two films. For example, the set up for this film mimicked that of Pitch Black, with bounty hunters replacing the random passengers of Pitch Black. The monsters who attack them in the end are virtual clones in every substantive way of those in Pitch Black. The bounty hunters feel like total knock-offs of the bounty hunters (minus the charismatic Toombs (Nick Chinlund)) from Chronicles. What's worse, none of these characters had a real personality. They just stood around acting tough by standing very still and whispering death threats at each other. That got old fast.

More fundamentally, however, Riddick featured a change in Riddick's character that suddenly made him very hard to like: he became arrogant.

When Riddick was first introduced in Pitch Black, he blew me away. Here was a character who made the toughest of tough guys look soft, but at the same time, he was awash in traits we like. For example, Riddick never blew his own horn by telling us how tough he was. Instead, his nemesis Johns told us how tough he was. For his part, Riddick downplayed his own toughness. Riddick also demonstrated right away that he wasn't the cold-blooded killer his character was presented as. To the contrary, he offered help, guidance and moral support to the other characters. Indeed, he quickly became their leader because he had such strong leadership traits. Combining this with his desire to remain isolated and the other characters' fear of him created a wonderfully ironic situation where they needed him on many levels, but no one knew if he could be trusted except you the audience. That built a lot of trust and pulled you into the character; it made you like him a lot.

Even in Chronicles, where they raised Riddick's profile by declaring him a sort of dark messiah as the last of the Furian race and as the one destined to destroy the Lord Marshall and bring down the Necromongers, Riddick still remained self-effacing. In comment after comment, Riddick disclaims any desire to be involved, points out his own lack of education and his lack of ability to change the world. And the few times he was called upon to prove his toughness, he did it with his actions and a minimum number of words. This gave him a sense of humility and continued his reluctant hero character, both of which are traits we like in our heroes.

This made Riddick really easy to like. You knew he was tough, and the fact he didn't need to tell you how tough he was only made it all the stronger. You also laughed at his jokes and you smirked when the stupid bad guys took his self-effacing comments as an invitation to test him. But in Riddick, that character is gone. In Riddick, Riddick is presented as essentially invincible and he knows it. He comes across as a predator who spouts off smug one-liners and spews arrogance. There is no humor in his approach to others. There is no sense that he wants to help others who find themselves in trouble. To the contrary, his motivation seems to be revenge. He even plays with the main bounty hunter's emotions when he discovers that the man is here to find out what happened to his son, Johns from Pitch Black. This is a cold-blooded Riddick who is very hard to like and who offers little to liven up the story.

This is why I couldn't get into this film. The story and set up are entirely stolen from the first two films; there is nothing original. And what they have copied, they copied in style only but without the critical substance which made it all such fun. Add the lack of any goodnatured bad guy for you to sort-of cheer for along with Riddick, and Riddick changing from self-effacing, funny and misunderstood superhero into cold-blooded, smug predator, and you have a film that lost everything that set the first two film apart. It's no wonder the film made less than a third of the others and just over a third of its budget.

Thoughts?