REVIEW - RIDDICK

David Twohy's would-be universe for his Riddick films (pun absolutely intended, how could it not be?!) is trashy nonsense, and the haphazard journey its three films to date have taken to the screen have rather decimated it. With this in mind, and the anticipation, no doubt, of modest grosses, Twohy here delivers a Riddick film (there's that pun again) that requires only very limited fore-knowledge to fully understand it, and none at all to enjoy it any better. With none of the grand pretensions that sunk The Chronicles of Riddick nine years ago, this represents the franchise where it ought to be: shlocky DTV B-movie territory. Twohy has a lot of (borrowed) ideas, a conservative visual imagination and a deaf ear for dialogue. He's happy for his films to run over time. He's happy for them to make abrupt genre shifts. He's happy for them to follow formula. Standard. And so, with expectations duly reduced, you can enter the theatre and appreciate whatever it is he's serving. Or, you should at least be able to. In parts, Riddick is quite good fun - the opening section, with Riddick versus all manner of vicious beasts, alone on an arid planet, is focused and involving, and the film takes a turn into Alien-franchise meets The Mist grounds when multiple such beasts attack a small building full of people. But beyond that, there's very little here of any note. Twohy invents excuses for action and tension at random intervals, producing the goods, just not always at the best moment, and often in vastly wrong quantities. And this is one of those frustrating films where you sometimes just have to accept that a lot has happened in between that last reel and the current one, and we're supposed to intuit it and move on. But yeh, take it as a shlocky B-movie. Objectively, that pardons nothing, but if you can switch your brain off for a couple of hours, it'll do.