Whee, the last review before Halloween Horror-movie-Review-a-thon! 31 Days of Horror! I am SO psyched! I feel like a teenage girl about to start as a freshman in high school, and over the summer, her acne cleared up and she got her braces off. Yes, THAT psyched! But let's get to the review before I pee myself and have to change my panties. Again.
Riddick (2013) picks up pretty much where the last Riddick movie left off. To sum up the first two movies in case you didn't see them, Riddick is an interplanetary criminal wanted for, well, killing pretty much everything he runs into. Where I come from, that's a talent, not a reason to put a bounty on a guy, but eh. Space is different. As a wanted man with a bounty on his head so large that you could afford to buy a planet with it, Riddick has been hunted by mercenaries and assassins for decades. In the last movie, he managed to assassinate a king, and took his place. Very briefly, Riddick explains in this movie that he "got sloppy" and lost his edge, and the Necromongers (the spacefaring conquerors he became king of) tried to kill him, and left him for dead on a desert planet. And that's just in the beginning of this movie, so you know he at least survives the assassination attempt. Now, all he has to do is recover from a shattered leg, various wounds from being dropped off a cliff, and survive a lack of food and water, all while fighting off legions of bloodthirsty desert creatures intent on eating him, also while looking for a way off-planet. Piece of cake!
I'm going to tell you about the one bad thing I dislike in this movie, before I get to the good parts. I never liked the entire 'Necromonger' story line to begin with, which is what the whole last movie was about. I mean, he goes up against an entire race of spacefaring conquerors, kills their leader, and then, has to deal with POLITICS. Ugh. It was probably good that he didn't know that whole "You keep what you kill" slogan of the necromongers before he offed their king, otherwise, he'd probably have let them kill him. No wonder he got soft. Politics will turn your brains to tapioca faster than cutting off the top of your skull, scooping out your brains with a spatula, and filling the empty space with tapioca. Yes, that fast. Now you know why all our politicians are idiots. And no, stop arguing. I'm not making any exceptions. So what I dislike, is that they clear it up with a five-minute thing about Riddick looking for his home planet of Furya, and how he "got sloppy." Riddick gets sloppy, and gets deposed, and now there's an entire goddamn ARMY of spacefaring conquerors out there, going from planet to planet, destroying EVERYTHING. Which, is what they did before Riddick started leading them. Why the hell wouldn't they return to that? It was working fine for them! So, in Riddick's five minutes of recrimination, he's let loose an entire armada of killers, who are still out there, destroying entire planets. Sloppy, indeed, Riddick. Sloppy, indeed.
Now, on to the good stuff. Whatever planet Riddick gets dumped on, and even he doesn't know the name, really is out to kill him. There's doggy-things, and scaly-things, and flying-things, and swimmy-things, and they all have sharp claws, and bitey jaws, and pointy tails, and nasty venom. What I like about this movie is that it's almost TWO HOURS of Riddick getting his edge back. It's not just monsters and beasties that Riddick has to kill. Mercs (mercenaries) track him down and he has to fight them, too. It's rare nowadays to get an almost two-hour long sci-fi movie that doesn't have naked blue aliens in it. This isn't Smurfs in Space. This is technology-driven, decent-looking-aliens-made-by-a-good-budget, lasers vs bone knives vs things with jaws bigger than my head, for two hours. It's an action movie with sci-fi as a background, which is what I like to see.
The movie gets a little slow in the middle, looking for tension and suspense instead of action, and I think that was a mistake, but not a huge one. Vin Diesel (who plays Riddick) does his usual job of looking beefy and acting tough, and Katie Sackhoff (of Battlestar Galactica fame) does her usual job of looking beefy and acting tough while showing off her boobs. In fact, I think everyone in this movie was selected based on their ability to look beefy and act tough, which, they are very good at. Even Katie Sackhoff made me pee myself, and only partially out of excitement. The CGI alien beasties even looked beefy and acted tough, and that's amazing, for a computer-generated image. I didn't pee myself, but I admit to wanting to tame and domesticate a pet alien doggy like Riddick did. Of course, if I tried, I'd probably lose a hand. And then an arm. And then, the rest of my limbs. And that's just to the CGI. My encounter with an alien beast would go much worse.
Riddick was a pretty decent movie. There was a good amount of action, and I liked the science fiction aspects of it. They were well done and made a fair amount of sense (except where they try to tell me you can't mix-and-match power cells... isn't that exactly what they did in Pitch Black? I do have a memory longer than your average goldfish). I was going to watch it again tonight, because I was so on-the-edge-my-seat the first time I watched it (last night), that I could hardly enjoy it in that, "I'm half drunk and this is a good movie" way I like to enjoy my monster flicks, but Madame Secretary with Tea Leoni came on again, and dammit, Tea looks hot with those smarty-pants mom-glasses on. Next time, I swear, Tea, you will not seduce me with your "I wear a suit that costs more than you make in a year" ways. You just won't. I am so over you.
That's all for tonight. Watching the Strain later. Catch you guys Oct. 1st for the first horror movie review of Halloween month! :-D And no, I have absolutely no idea of what I am reviewing yet. I'm playing it by ear this year. heh, I made a rhyme.
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