Designed to expand the Riddick universe created in "Pitch Black" and expanded upon in video games, it tanked horribly. Vin Diesel, who has invested so much in the character that made him a star, put Riddick in cryo-sleep while he went a-fast-and-furiousing to get the readies together to make Riddick 3.
Which supposedly is even more disappointing.
The beginning of the film has risible dialogue and acting - hello Thandie Newton - scraped from the bottom of the darkest barrel in hell. But the design is amazing, and the "Big Bads", the Necromongers, are wonderfully designed right from their armour, to their flying mausoleum spacecraft detailed with tortured statues made by an astronaut Hieronomymous Bosch.
The ending is perfunctory, and ruined by a final fight scene that doesn't quite work.
It is the middle section, the section where Riddick allows a squad of Mercenaries, wonderfully led by Nick Chinlund as merc leader Toombs, to take him to the prison world of Crematoria, a "no daylight slam", that really works the best.
Crematoria is beyond hell. It is a super-Mercury ravaged by a merciless star sending out searing radiation onto a landscape of tortured lava towers and rolling fireballs. It's temperature ranges from 900 above, to a rather impossible 700 below, and only deep underground can anyone survive.
It is into this subterranean prison that Riddick is deposited while the mercs argue the price on his head with the guards, a grimy bunch of mixed ethnicity with a French boss much given to spitting and a Russian thug with an acute nose.
Below this, of course, Riddick first's job is to fight for his life against the usual slam tough nuts who want to give him a good beating - or worse. Of course he does so, surrounded by the stem rising from the volcanic interior, and scaring my favourite sub character, a goggle wearing mole apparently sexually turned on by male violence back into the hole in the lava he apparently and unwisely seems to live in. The self appointed "Guvnor"welcomes him to the jail, a rusted iron clattering of cells arranged into a cliff face and populated with a mix of rastas and ginger women, apparently. As well as Riddick's former child mentor Jack, calling herself Kira and now mutated into Alexa Davalos instead of Rhianna Griffith.
Some more great scenes follow; Riddick kills a guard with a tea cup to the heart before shitting the other guards that he can do the same with the key from a tin of pilchards, and then the remaining guards decide to rattle the prisoners with their spiny hell hounds - mutant armadillo cats with spines and a habit of turning scarlet when angry.
They eat most of the prisoners they catch, but no the Furyan Riddick, oh no. They love him!
Upstairs the warden gets wise to the fact that the Mercs have stolen their prisoner from under the noses of the Necromongers, and all hell breaks loose in the weird flying saucer on screws that is their HQ. Riddick leads the Guvnor, Kira and some other prisoners up top, to find most of Mercs dead, the Guards fled, and Toombs dangling on a rope. Riddick takes care of him by locking him in with the hell hounds, and then they deliberate how to beat the guards to the hanger and the one serviceable spacecraft before the Necromongers surely arrive.
And so follows a great set piece; while the guards run the 29.1 km in tunnels, the convicts have to run the terminator between freezing night and boiling day, initially freezing, but then sweat starting to drip as the sun approaches the horizon. They go through a snowstorm of thick black ash, through termite looking towers, across semi melted lava fields, and then finally a harsh climb up a cliff face as the suns rays cremate most of the escapees.
The Guards have beaten the prisoners to the hanger, but not the Necromongers, who make short work of the French and the Russians, while Riddick watches on. Alas he and his convicts get no further either, and he is left for dead as Kira is kidnapped for Necro conversion...
...and then it all goes to pot again, as a bizarre looking Linus Roache appears and expedites massively before burning himself to death rather needlessly, summing up all the problems is a literal flash as he incinerates in a wondrous looking way.
End. But its a great section of a not great film - that I still love because like Dune I can sometimes survive awful writing if the design is good. And in Chronicles, it really is.
