The Chronicles of Riddick
Directed by David Twohy

Ambitious, sprawling, uninhibitedly goofy and almost great, The Chronicles of Riddick is a love-it or hate-it affair, mainly because it’s courageous enough to have a distinct personality. The Riddick character, played by Vin Diesel, was introduced in the 2000 cult hit Pitch Black. But instead of retreading that monster movie’s formula, director David Twohy delivers a sci fi adventure that (while building on the last film’s spiritual overtones, and adding some political ones) is more about mythology and giant spectacle than focused thrills.

Picking up 5 years after Pitch Black, escaped convict Riddick is being hunted across planets by mercenaries before he’s asked to fight the alien race the Necromongers, who are in the process of killing off all other species and making their survivors conform to their religious and ideological beliefs. Riddick is thought to be the last survivor of the Furions, the one race the Necromongers still fear. Although Riddick claims neither knowledge or allegiance--a clever play on Diesel’s own racial ambiguity--he’s thrown unwittingly into the middle of a new war.

The art directors and cinematographer Hugh Johnson give the film a baroque golden look, recalling the way David Lynch’s Dune used a similar visual design to fulfill opposing tones of royalty and decay. The Chronicles of Riddick is a big-scale adventure across eye-popping cosmic vistas, guided by a perfectly realized comic action hero, and fitted with an imagination that doesn’t spare viewers who aren’t paying attention.

The movie’s sillier elements--occasionally clunky one-liners, reckless logical disregard--only seem detrimental when taken separately from the scope of Twohy’s aspiration. His assertion that we should have no trouble accepting a convicted killer like Riddick as a saviour is subversively left field rather than the mark of unconsidered morality: Riddick is, after all, preferably humane next to the government he’s up against, which uses mass murder as a stepping stone to power.

The centrepiece where Riddick outruns a sunrise that’s incinerating a planet with 700 degree heat might not agree with the plausibility police, but if you don’t consider it a thrilling moment in action cinema there’s probably nothing I can say to convince you.