What's the best way to describe the Chronicles of Riddick.
It's a bad Alien 3, but it's a good Alien Resurrection.
So I don't know if there's any truth to what I'm about to say; but I've always thought the first Riddick film as something of an alien's rip-off.
It makes me wonder if somewhere down the line when they were making this 'Chronicle of Riddick' movie somebody said; ''Hey maybe we should back up a little bit from the prison scene. Otherwise we'll be accused of just being an alien rip-off franchise.''
So the screenwriters, producer or some sort of Studio exact told them to put a secondary story about space Romans and a strange religious cult.
Honestly I have no idea what happened.
Now when I was younger I legitimately loved this film because it was an awesome badass action man running around beating up prison thugs and going against strange armour clad Praetorians.
It's the perfect movie for a pre-teen action nerd.
But watching it now it just makes me laugh.
There are still one or two interesting fight scenes and the Riddick character can be entertaining in his own right. But for the most part, all I see is Vin Diesel trying to put on this tough guy persona and inflating himself up like a puffer fish to show just how ''cool'' he is.
It's the kind of over the top Macho attitude that would have worked out a hell of a lot better in the 1980s but was still vaguely amusing even in the early 2000s.
Now you just come off like an old dude trying to act cool but seemingly looking like nothing more than a giant dork.
Or some sort of try hard.
Anyways let's see if we can understand the story. In the last movie Riddick helps to random people get off a planet filled with bug monsters.
Said bug monsters only hunting the night which works out really well with Riddick because he can only really fight in the darkness.
Or at least he's only supposed to be able to fight in the darkness but when I need them to we can fight in any old space without a care in the world.
Now in this movie Riddic's on the run from various bounty hunters because the Priest (who was one of the two people he helped escape the planet from the last movie) put a giant bounty on his head to bring them back.
For some reason the priest couldn't just send a message to riddic saying;
''Hey could you come back to this particular planet to help us against the evil space Romans.''
And you can't tell me he wasn't able to find the guy given that all the bounty hunters could find him with relative ease.
So Riddic returns to civilization to (possably) kill the priest who he had saved the last movie but then he stopped himself from doing that as the guy has a family and yadyadyayad....
The space Romans shown up. They proved to be a big old scary force of ridiculous over-the-top weirdos who in reality are about as intimidating as a wet soggy sock.
They go on to conquer the planet and Riddick is caught by the same bounty hunters who were chasing him from the beginning of the film. They then ship him off to a prison site that he manipulated them into going to.
From there, he needs Jack (the other of the two people he saved from the bug Planet) who purposely got herself thrown in jail because she wanted to acquire his eyes.*
Now Riddick has to fight his way out of a Maximum Security Prison and get himself off of a planet without being turned into a crispy Critter.
He actually fails in this endeavour and is saved by a mystical man, who was working for the space Romans.
The guy then tells him that he has to go back to the planning to defeat the space Romans because he's part of a super special secret awesome race of weirdos who are supposed to be this great and wonderful threat to the space Romans. Despite the fact that in this story the space Romans wiped out the entire planet with relative ease.
In fact it wasn't even the Roman's who did that. It was literally just their leader before he became a demigod. So I guess really it's just Riddick who's actually the cool guy and the rest of his race are a bunch of losers who can't do nothing.
While all this is going on a bunch of people within the space Roman Empire are plotting to take power away from their Divine space wizard Emperor.
And it turns out that they're all pretty useless. As the combined efforts of Jack ''the crazy killer girl who works with Riddick in the original movie''. Riddick himself and this other crazy space Roman all together could barely defeat the Space Roman King.
But then they're able to do so in the end and Riddic becomes supreme god commander of this entire Empire despite having no interest whatsoever in politics and having the Charisma of a wet sponge.
This movie is too silly to take itself seriously, but at the same time it doesn't relish in its own stupidity.
Which means it's not self-aware poking fun at itself. And honestly it's kind of nice to watch a dumb movie do that these days. Too many movies remind me of those Deadpool flicks, constantly making fun of themselves in a ironic but not ironic fashion.
If you're looking for some fun action film with an incredibly monotone but still solid enough acting performance from Vin Diesel that I'd say ''chronicle of Riddick'' is worth a shot. If nothing else it's like Battlefield Earth but not boring.
*Riddick stated in the original movie that is eyes or the product of a prison surgery to help him see in the Never ending darkness.
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