{"id":26097,"date":"2013-09-09T11:01:57","date_gmt":"2013-09-09T15:01:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/?p=26097"},"modified":"2013-09-09T11:01:57","modified_gmt":"2013-09-09T15:01:57","slug":"riddick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/2013\/09\/riddick\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cRiddick\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Bob Garver<\/p>\n

\"\"\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I have no idea why anybody would want to see a third \u201cRiddick\u201d movie in 2013. We first met Riddick (Vin Diesel) in a 2000 sci-fi\/horror movie called \u201cPitch Black.\u201d The film turned a small profit, making $39 million at the domestic box office on a budget of $23 million. Four years later, Vin Diesel was a bigger star, and so a bigger budget was allotted for a sequel. \u201cThe Chronicles of Riddick\u201d cost $105 million and flopped at $56 million. It also got dreadful reviews and took years off Diesel\u2019s career. Now we\u2019re being asked to rejoin a franchise whose last installment was a movie that lost nearly $50 million nine years ago.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 To be fair, the new film tries its best to distance itself from \u201cThe Chronicles of Riddick.\u201d All too quickly Riddick forfeits his title of Lord Marshal of the Necromongers (don\u2019t ask) in exchange for a ride to his home planet. The Necromongers instead take him to an unfamiliar desert planet where they leave him for dead. And just like that, \u201cChronicles\u201d is written off and I say good riddance. The elaborate fantasy world of that film was too expensive and it was a bad fit for Riddick\u2019s goonlike disposition. Of course, this does mean that we\u2019ll probably get an unfortunate sequel where Riddick gets revenge on the Necromongers.<\/p>\n

Riddick does his best to survive on the new planet (even domesticating a hideous zebra-dog), but realizes he won\u2019t last long with cyclones of scorpions living in the planet\u2019s water supply. He\u2019s very much a wanted fugitive, so he decides to bait two groups of bounty hunters into landing on the planet. One team is led by Santana (Jordi Molla), a character so instantly annoying it\u2019s a wonder his men don\u2019t kill him themselves on the ride over. The other, more intimidating group is led by Johns (Matt Nable), who has a personal score to settle with Riddick. The movie assumes that you\u2019ll recognize the name Johns from \u201cPitch Black,\u201d a film that made less than $40 million 13 years ago. The film also assumes that you won\u2019t question why the 41-year-old Nable is playing the father of the 38-year-old Cole Hauser. Riddick\u2019s plan is to steal one team\u2019s ship and let them all escape together on the other one. The teams don\u2019t cooperate with him, or each other, and soon it looks as though nobody may get off the planet alive.<\/p>\n

Like \u201cPitch Black,\u201d the bulk of \u201cRiddick\u201d is a typical slasher movie with alien scorpions as the killers. We\u2019re supposed to get enjoyment out of guessing which of the bounty hunters will live the longest and how creative and gruesome the deaths will be. Riddick gets in a few funny lines, usually pertaining to how violent he is or how dumb everyone else is to mess with him. The same can be said of Dahl (Katee Sackhoff), a female bounty hunter from Johns\u2019 team who likes to flaunt her violent tendencies. She also does another kind of scene that gets the male audience howling, though not with laughter.<\/p>\n

If you look hard enough, you can find some fun moments in \u201cRiddick.\u201d But there\u2019s no reason why this film should exist. The main reason why \u201cThe Chronicles of Riddick\u201d flopped (aside from that it was horrible) was because Diesel and director David Twohy saw a franchise where there wasn\u2019t one. And now they want to continue this franchise that never was, using characters and storylines that nobody remembers. I know it makes sense to release a movie where Vin Diesel shoots and fights a lot, but why add to this disaster of a series? If anything, they should have just remade \u201cPitch Black.\u201d<\/p>\n

One and a Half Stars out of Five.<\/p>\n

\u201cRiddick\u201d is rated R for strong violence, language and some sexual content\/nudity. Its running time is 119 minutes.<\/p>\n

Contact Bob Garver at rrg251@nyu.edu<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Bob Garver \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I have no idea why anybody would want to see a third \u201cRiddick\u201d movie in 2013. We first met Riddick (Vin Diesel) in a 2000 sci-fi\/horror… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26097"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26097"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26097\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}