So… saw Riddick… the direct sequel to the very good Pitch Black and a lip-service sequel to Chronicles of Riddick (the actual sequel to Pitch Black). After the Riddick franchise went off the rails with the overstuffed, over-ambitious, and doesn’t-feel-like-a-sequel Chronicles, it didn’t look like Vin Diesel was going to be able to be his very own private ultimate bad ass any longer (I mean, really, they turned his character into a Mary Sue in his very own universe…).

I’m happy to say, Riddick is just a survival, action, horror movie and doesn’t try to be more than that. It’s an honest, meat-and-potatoes actioner, very much like Pitch Black. No worlds get saved or destroyed, nobody is crowned King of the Nercromongers (that’s a thing!), and Dame Judi Densch doesn’t show in a pointless attempt to class up the joint.

It’s surprisingly long without feeling bloated… I enjoyed the weird Wall-E intro where about 30 minutes of film passes without much dialog and only a little narration before introducing the rest of the doomed cast.

Characters that I thought were given just enough screen time to start either liking or hating as the case needed to be (before everyone started dying). Yes, Vin Diesel gets to play in his bad-ass playground but its a little more down to earth.

Same guy wrote and directed this that did the first two and I think he (David Twohey) may just work better on a smaller, more human scale.

This is a good, dependable, economic film… it is was it is and doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a sci-fi monster mash full of bad-ass anti-heroes, bad-ass mercenaries, and big ugly monsters with a lot of teeth. You know if you’ll like it or not.

Score: 84