Starring: Vin Diesel, Judi Dench, Colm Feore

5 out of 10 stars

Computer graphics may well be destroying movies.

True they've allowed filmmakers the ability to create creatures and lands that could only be dreamed of before, such as with The Lord of the Rings trilogy. And that's not to say that The Chronicles of Riddick would be any better if it had to rely on miniatures, puppets, animatronics, and matte paintings. No, it could possibly still be the overblown, foolish, monotonous flick that it is.

But I don't think so.

Writer/director David Twohy has made three above-average B-movies: Pitch Black, Below, and The Arrival. That's quite a feat these days because B-movies are now multi-million dollar spectacles, such as Independence Day, so making good, scrappy genre pictures with low(er) budgets is a labor of love. In these films, when Twohy's films rely on their characters and the situations he's plopped them into, they're pretty great. When they rely on effects, however, such as the CGI night creatures in Pitch or the double-jointed aliens in Arrival, they kind of fall apart. Twohy sure loves these effects, but he doesn't need them.

Now that he has at his disposal an armada of effect technicians he's gone wild. Like a sophomore on Spring Break in Florida he's flashing his effects all over the place, and the result is about as interesting. "Pleeeasse, put your effects back in," you want to say, half-shielding your eyes. "You're embarrassing everyone at the table."

It's really too bad because there are several glimmers of what Riddick could have been, what I really hoped it would be. In the opening Riddick is on a desolate ice planet and being chased down by some unscrupulous bounty hunters, led by a guy named Toombs (Nick Chinlund). Riddick turns the tables on Toombs, discovers who put the bounty on his head, and heads off in Toomb's spacecraft to get the reward taken off. This event comes back later to bedevil Riddick and it appears that Twohy is going to make a Sci-Fi version of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. No such luck.

No, now that Twohy has this incredible effects palette at his beck-and-call he can create the massive armies of the Necromonger, a warrior race that descends upon planets, decimates them and assimilates the population. They have a gazillion ships and are led by the Lord Marshal (Colm Feore). The Lord Marshal has been to the Underverse, a legendary place where…well, we're not entirely sure what the heck it is (bet we'll find out in the next installment though) but just visiting there has enabled the Lord Marshal to act like the Flash, speeding along faster than anyone else, with the ability to tear men's souls from their bodies. The Necromonger's latest conquest is Helion, a race of Banana Republic-wearing people who get taken over in one night. Just below the Lord Marshal in rank is Vaako (Karl Urban) a scheming usurper who is goaded on by his ambitious wife, Dame Vaako (Thandie Newton).

The Lord Marshal is scared though. He was told, as a young warrior that he would one day die at the hands of a Furian, a race of uber-warriors. Guess who turns out to be the last Furian? It's a bit better than finding out that Riddick had a really high midichlorian count, but not a lot.

The Lord Marshal is told all of this, by the way, by an Elemental, a race of beings that can appear or disappear at will, as if on the breeze. The Elemental is played by Dame Judy Dench and it's a magic mirror role, a lazy construct that helps get a lot of the exposition out of the way.

The scope is so huge that the film can never pull itself back. There's too much territory to cover when expanded to such a global scale. Riddick saves the universe? Isn't that kind of the opposite of what made Pitch Black such a surprise? Chunking it onto the same galactic stage puts it in the league with other bombastic projects such as Dune and only slightly more successful.

When it seems that we'll never get off the depressing planet of Helion Riddick finds himself caught once again by Toombs (marginally fun) and heading to the maximum security prison on Crematoria, a planet whose sun regularly char-broils the surface at 700 degrees when it rises. It rises at unpredictable intervals as well, in this film usually when the script requires it.

Down in the bowels of the prison Riddick meets up again with the girl he saved from the first film. But she's grown up and become as fierce as Riddick, taking the name Kyra (Alexa Davalos). It's also down in the prison where they release some CGI guard dogs, that look like they have serrated armor for hair.

The dogs, like the crashing ships, or the encroaching exploding heat blasts, are just plain boring. We know it's CGI. No one is going to get hurt (well, except the predetermined extras) and we have to watch people pant and run as if it might. It's tedious and a bit of insult.

Perhaps if Twohy hadn't had all the CGI ships, dogs, spirit people and Johnny Quick power moves at his disposal he'd have been forced to be as creative and ingenious as he has been in the past. What we'd have on our hands then would be another Road Warrior instead of a rewarmed The Postman. But he did, and thus he wasn't, and Chronicles of Riddick is the poorer for it.