Friday, June 25, 2004

PHILM - THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK: I did love Pitch Black, and was surprised to enjoy the supremely silly XXX back in summer 2002, but The Chronicles of Riddick has to be the worst-conceived sequel since Highlander II, and the most disappointing summer blockbuster I've seen since Dude, Where's My Dragon? Pitch Black was character-driven. XXX was funny. Chronicles, however, is just a bad, bad action movie.

The plot is approximately two-thirds of Conan The Barbarian, chromed-out and heaved unceremoniously into a rapidly decaying orbit. We have an impossibly muscle-bound and totally unstoppable barbarian warrior up against a mysterious death cult and its supernatural leader, running into the teeth of the cult's legions on the strength of a legend that one from his tribe ("Furians" ... ugh) is destined to destroy the bad guy. The details -- and there are plenty -- that embroider this outline are arbitrary to the point of being totally unmotivated, as if the production team storyboarded the action sequences and then sent them off to Ye Olde CGI Shoppe thinking they'd just throw a plot around them sometime later on.

I might have forgiven the ridiculously convoluted story if the production had sported a sharp, rich, coherent and compelling production design like that in, say, The Fifth Element. (Just to be clear, by "compelling production design" I do not mean "Milla Jovovich wearing nothing but orange suspenders", though that was pretty hard to argue with.) But Chronicles' aesthetic is as jumbled and inexplicable as its so-called story, melding the worst elements of the Sci-fi Channel's Dune miniseries with costumes -- particularly the bad-guy armor -- that look like they were rejected from LOTR or remaindered from a defunct Glen Danzig fansite.

The last hope, as this is an action flick, is the action, but unfortunately there's no there, there either. The fights are turbulent, blurred, close and quick-cut in that all too common style that recalls the still images of a superhero comic book without being nearly as compelling. The larger action sequences are simply larger, not better in any noticeable way, so the whole thing just lies there like a tired old balloon with nothing to inflate it.

Now, this may strike some as a strange thing to say, but I had come to expect better from Vin Diesel.

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