Last Sunday I was so tired that I didn’t want to do anything except be a complete sloth, so I went to Blockbuster and both rented and purchased some movies to help me waste away the day.  By the time I went to bed that night I had watched six different movies and had truly wasted the entire day (much to my own satisfaction as I’d not enjoyed a lazy day in more than six months).

The Chronicles of Riddick turned out to be a much better movie than I had anticipated.  As a sequel to Pitch Black, I was not expecting much when I watched it.  Pitch Black was at best an OK movie.  For that reason I had not expected much from The Chronicles of Riddick.

Vin Diesel returned as the anti-hero Riddick, five years after the Pitch Black story line, who finds himself in the middle of a galactic war.  As you might expect, it falls to Riddick (someone we know as a bloodthirsty criminal) to save mankind.

The special effects are excellent, the story is surprisingly full of depth, and it never hurts to have someone like Vin Diesel to look at for a few hours (that’s a body built for sin!).  I was pleasantly surprised by The Chronicles of Riddick and would absolutely recommend seeing it — but don’t expect too much from it.  It is a sequel which happens to be significantly better than its predecessor, but it’s not going to go down in the annals of history as anything more than just another sci-fi adventure.

It is a B movie, so one must expect the repercussions thereof.  It suffers from tissue-thin plotting (or should that be “plodding”?), a horrifically apparent lack of character development, and what could only be described as skimpy roles that appear to waste the talents of Thandie Newton and Judi Dench.  Despite these shortcomings, however, the movie is what it is — a mediocre story brought to vivid life on a vast digital landscape with the conceptual allure of a lavish graphic novel.