Film review: Riddick
“Back in the day,” as actor Vin Diesel likes to say in his revenge and car-chasing films, Diesel spoke to The Prague Post. He was in town to promote to film the 2002 spy action flick xXx, which was mainly filmed here, and waxed philosophically about his Riddick character in the 2000 film Pitch Black. He compared the hell-planet prison escape film to the novel The Hobbit, and said that a subsequent trilogy of films based around the escaped convict named Riddick would be like The Lord of the Rings trilogy, only in outer space, with him as a sort of anti-Frodo. A very anti-Frodo.
The follow up to Pitch Black, and the first of this supposed trilogy, was Chronicles of Riddick, which came out in 2004. Critics hated it, but over the years it has gotten a cult following. Diesel has spent much of the intervening time trying to get the second section of the trilogy made. His efforts paid off, if you will, in Riddick. Theoretically, this should be comparable to The Two Towers, but let’s not even go there.
The worst sin of Riddick- and there are many – is that the CGI is not convincing. For most of the film the audience is painfully aware that the set is a few plastic rocks against a computer generated background and sky. This keeps the viewer at a bit of a distance.
Read the full review at The Prague Post.
(Still of Vin Diesel in Riddick. © 2013 – Universal Pictures)
