riddick (david twohy, 2013)
Monday, September 30, 2013
I once attended a day-long music festival (well, maybe I have that wrong, since the name of the show was “This Is Not a Festival”) that featured 7 acts, including my beloved Sleater-Kinney. As you might expect, the crowd got bigger the further the show progressed, as each act was a bit more well-known than the last. By the time Sleater-Kinney hit the stage, the place was mostly full. Or so I thought. One more act remained, Sonic Youth, who were the headliners, and it was then that the crowd filled up. Caught up in my own taste preferences, I found this surprising … didn’t everyone come for Sleater-Kinney? I thought of this while watching Riddick. Katee Sackhoff doesn’t show up for about half an hour, and I kept thinking, “where’s Katee? Don’t they know she’s the reason we’re here?” Of course, that wasn’t true … folks were there to see Vin Diesel. And see him they did. That first half an hour consisted almost entirely of Diesel-as-Riddick trying to survive, Crusoe style, on a desolate planet. It was pretty interesting, even a bit risky. Sure, Diesel was the drawing card, but to give the entire screen over to him (and the special effects) for the first 30 minutes was certainly a way of saying, “people want to see Vinnie”. The remaining 90 minutes are decent … the supporting actors overact engagingly, with the exception of Sackhoff, who underplays as Yet Another Ass-Kicking Woman (she’s just fine in the role, but at this point, she could do it in her sleep). The much publicized five seconds of Starbuck’s sideboob come and go very quickly, and if that’s the only reason you’re watching, you might as well just check it out on the Internet. I gave the first movie in the series 7/10, agreed with most people who found the second movie bloated and gave it a 6/10. Riddick is about as good as Pitch Black, so I’ll give in to the grade inflation curse and give this one 7/10, as well.
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