Good Heavens, if that isn’t the most pretentious title for a sci-fi action picture, ever, then I’d sure hate to hear what is.    If it was called The Chronicles of Riddick, Volume One:  As Falls the Sword, So Falls the Empire, it couldn’t be more overblown and ridiculous (and that was a title I just came up with).  How on Earth did Twohy think this up, and NOT smack himself?  Riddick-ulous, I'd call it.

I imagine part of this is starting to believe the mythos you’ve created is such a wonderful, terrific framework that you start to overblow its importance and forget that what ya got here is a sci-fi action picture.  Oh, it’s fairly epic in scale, hopping about from planet to planet and with the threat of universal Armageddon hanging over the whole proceedings, so it’s not like there isn’t the possibility of living up to that silly title.   It’s just that the film itself doesn’t really try that.  Instead, it’s almost as if, once having thought up the title, Twohy figured the hard work was all done and he could just bang out any old script and it would work on screen.

And it kind of shows, throughout.   We have the frozen planet, which exists pretty much just so we can have a frozen planet.  (The whorled, finger-print like pattern on the surface is interesting looking, but come on, “interesting looking” is hardly a criteria for a whole movie.)  We have the hot prison planet, Crematoria, which exists for a couple of action/outrun-the-sun sequences, and is generally effective, so that can go in the plus column.  Then we get Riddick making friends with some hell-hound prison dog.  It’s a nice scene (“It’s an animal thing,” he says) but it goes nowhere.   (Don’t tell me about deleted scenes, those don’t count.)

We also have a bounty-hunter subplot that takes Riddick away from the action and to the aforementioned prison planet.  Ultimately, the purpose of this seems solely to re-introduce a character from the first film and nothing more.  (Oh, and to provide some stunt sequences, and add to the running time.)  Keith David’s wife and daughter show up to be briefly imperiled, then they disappear.  There’s a scary bad guy with a knife in his back who is way too easily defeated.  There’s just a lot of stuff that is picked up and turned over then returned to the toy box without being played with.

The main plot of the film, about some race of bad dudes called Necromongers, seems to engage Twohy the least, yet ironically, the scenes dealing with this plot are the most cohesive.

I dunno.  That whole title just hangs over the film like some dorky freshman English metaphor that someone spent all night (and a hit on the bong) concocting, and he ain’t gonna cut it out just for some silly reason like, it doesn’t fit anymore.   Fitting with things is so bourgeois, man.

There are certainly some nice sequences here and there, and the Riddick character remains kind of cool and fun to watch, if a bit uninvolving other than as a stuntman He does get one great line, though ("I'll kill you with my teacup.").    Some of the Necromongers are interesting, like those specially adapted either for mind-reading (the creepy “Quasi-dead”) or as kind of human scanner-recorders (I think they were called “seers”).  The ships were cool throughout, as were the strange rippling effects of the Necromonger weapons.

But, boy, I just don’t know how you could watch some of this stuff and not groan.  The very end, for example, when Riddick does what an exhausted person would naturally do, is…well, okay it’s logical, and it’s been kind of established, but man, is it stupid. 

For something in which thousands of lives are at stake, it remains pretty distant and indifferent throughout.   Nice eye-candy here and there, and the Necromongers have pretty cool weapons and spaceships, and there are some scattered moments which are great (the Necromongers rush through a hail of enemy fire to get to an open area, where, just before they collapse dead, they detonate a device which destroys all the opposing troops in the area—that takes toughness, boy.  None of the other Necromongers seem to have that kind of dedication, though. It's like the film only had that one scene for all of them to share. One gets the impression they are tough, bad dudes but the film never gives them another chance to be tough and bad). 

So, see it if you are in the mood for something mindless and flashy, but please don’t think you’re getting something like that title.  What am I saying?  Geez, in Hollywood today, this film probably counts as deep thinking.