Memo to movie bad guys: Never vow to put Vin Diesel’s head in a box. He may take umbrage. And consider the practicalities: How do you saw off the cranium of a man with no neck? Even if you could, you’d need a forklift to move it around.
In “Riddick,” that Diesel head (like a flexed triceps) and that Diesel voice (the exhaust pipe of a Harley) prove well-matched to writer-director David Twohy’s unashamed B-movie vision. This is the rare sci-fi actioner that doesn’t rush to bore you with its views on global warming, class divisions or immigration; at no point does Jodie Foster wander in trying to sound European.
In the third entry in the series that began in 2000 with the surprise low-budget hit “Pitch Black” and continued with the expensive 2004 flop “The Chronicles of Riddick,” Diesel’s cunning survivor Richard Riddick is (again) the wronged ex-soldier stranded alone on a merciless planet as bounty hunters prowl the galaxy for him. He’s wanted dead or alive, but preferably dead.
Wandering alone, Riddick inoculates himself against the venom of the planet’s vicious pincer-mouthed serpents and domesticates a jackal-like beast that becomes a stalwart guardian. Twohy has an enticing patience that allows you to get accustomed to Riddick’s world and the methodical ways he copes with it. These quiet, slow-developing scenes stand in delightful contrast to, say, the frantic cutting and hunger for explosions of the tiresome “Iron Man 3.”
That “Riddick” was made on more of a Tinfoil Man budget works very much to its advantage. It’s like an early-’70s Charlton Heston sci-fi movie that has to function as a story because it can’t afford bombast. And when the gangs of bounty hunters show up — one led by a swaggering Spanish jerk named Santana (a highly amusing Jordi Molla), the other by Johns (Matt Nable), the militarily efficient father of Riddick’s enemy from the first movie — the testosterone sprays off the screen. You may have to punch someone on your way out of the theater just to relieve the manly ache of pent-up aggression.
The competing teams of bounty hunters squabble among themselves, with Santana threatens rape in the general direction of the lesbian cutie Dahl (Katee Sackhoff), who almost regretfully kicks his ass. Riddick (who can see in the dark) could be anywhere, they tell one another, unaware he’s perched right on top of their ship. In a cleverly executed piece of misdirection, Twohy wrings tension out of a potential explosion that segues beautifully into the hunters’ realization that Riddick has stolen the initiative.
The somewhat hokey Edgar Rice Burroughs atmosphere (with production design touches from “Alien” and “Road Warrior”) is made cool with Riddick’s cynical, sometimes funny Raymond Chandler narration (a big improvement over those stuffy and declarative Heston lines). The movie actually winds up being engagingly chatty, with insults flying in the interludes between the cheaply done effects sequences.
That CGI can be laughably bad — a shot of the men on flying choppers looks so pasted-together it could have been on an old kiddie show like “Land of the Lost.” But cheap effects are forgivable if you’re engaged in the story, and for me the two hours went by quickly. I do wish the last 20 minutes hadn’t been mired in murk (another way to cheat when the money isn’t there) but what’s more important is the story errors — the pincer monsters suddenly become way too easy to kill, and Riddick is a passive figure at a climactic moment, his survival dependent on others.
Still, the movie jogs along nicely without ever getting a case of the stupids; far from being a bloated “John Carter,” it’s just a pared-down yarn of survival: “Die Hard” on a planet.