The Media Tourist

Vin Diesel’s back for another brawny Riddick adventure

Riddick

Starring Vin Diesel, Karl Urban & Katee Sackhoff

Directed by David Twohy

R, 119 min.

Released Sept. 9, 2013

The latest pulpy sci-fi yarn spun around the super-bad space-survivalist-antihero of the title opens on a bleak desert planet, an inhospitable place no reputable intergalactic travel agent could possibly recommend.

“I don’t know how many times I’ve been crossed off the list and left for dead,” says Riddick (Vin Diesel) in a growly opening narration.

Then he grabs a giant vulture by the neck and chokes it, sets his broken leg just in time to fend off a pack of marauding jackals, and gets the upper hand in an encounter with a carnivorous “mud demon,” a colossus that looks like a nasty mutation of a dinosaur, tadpole and scorpion.

Riddick is marooned in this desolate, dangerous place, all alone, Robinson Crusoe-style.

But as to whoever he thinks has been crossing him off the list—well, it certainly hasn’t been anyone making movies and videogames. Riddick follows two previous live-action films, Pitch Black (2000) and The Chronicles of Riddick (2004), plus an animated feature and two games. And Diesel has played the character in all of them.

So there is a rather detailed mythology to Riddick, his tale, and how he ended up on this desert orb called Furya. You can go back and connect all the dots, if you’d like, but it’s unnecessary. (Why do his eyes glow? Not important—don’t worry about it.) This movie can stand pretty much on its own story-wise, and the franchise as a whole isn’t trying to be Star Trek, for goodness sake.

The Riddick series isn’t a string of polished sci-fi pearls, by any stretch, but it does deliver pretty much what fans expect: slam-bang action, space creatures, decent effects, a good deal of dry, wry humor, and just enough R-rated skin, blood and language to appease grownup tastes.

The plot of Riddick is simple enough, with overtones of a vintage Western transplanted a few centuries into the future and several light years out into distant space. When Riddick, a wanted man for murder, among other galactic misdeeds, triggers the signal beacon from an abandoned security outpost, it’s answered by two competing teams of bounty hunters anxious to haul him in.

The mercenaries, expecting to make quick work of their task, are unprepared for their quarry’s lethal predatory skills—and for Riddick’s plan to shanghai one of their two ships to hightail it off his rock. There’s also the matter of that big, nasty-looking thunderstorm on the horizon, and the monstrous surprise Riddick knows it will unleash once the rain begins to hit the ground.

Riddick may be a criminal in this Wild West, way-out “frontier,” but he’s the good guy by comparison—heck, he even raised one of the jackal pups to become his loyal “dog Friday.” There’s no question about who the audience is rooting for.

And there’s also little question, by the end of the movie, about whether or not you can expect to see Riddick again. If you haven’t learned already, you should know by now: This is one guy you should never cross off the list.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

Getaway is a gear-grinding fireball of a movie mess

Getaway

Starring Ethan Hawke & Selena Gomez

Directed by Courtney Solomon

PG-13, 90 min.

Released Aug. 30, 2013

“Moderation in all things,” cautioned the ancient Roman dramatist Terence, who obviously didn’t have anything to do with this stinking, smoking backfire of a modern movie.

Because good ol’ Terence has been gone for more than 2,000 years—and also because there’s nothing in moderation about Getaway, which is basically one long, excessive, over-the-top, pedal-to-the-metal car chase. It’s the movie equivalent of reading a letter from someone who types everything in ALL CAPS, and ends each sentence with a handful of exclamation points (!!!!).

In what passes for a plot, Ethan Hawke plays a disgraced race driver blackmailed into stealing an extremely tricked-out Shelby GT500 Super Snake and driving like hell through a town in Bulgaria with a young woman (former Disney star Selena Gomez) riding shotgun.

If he doesn’t get to where he’s supposed to go, and do exactly what he’s told to do en route, something very bad will happen to his kidnapped wife.

Hawke’s character receives his driving instructions from a mystery man (Jon Voight) with a smarmy Euro-accent coming from the car’s hi-tech dashboard phone: “Turn left!” “Drive through the market!” “Ram the truck!”

The mystery man has set things up so the passenger—a spoiled little rich girl with mad computer-hacking skillz and a rich banker daddy, as fate would have it—would come along at just the right moment to become a part of his plan. And he’s rigged the car with cameras, inside and out, so he (and we) can see what’s going on, from every conceivable angle.

That actually makes the wildly implausible story seem like it makes more sense, and moves along more reasonably, than it does. Onscreen, it’s a screeching, gear-grinding fireball of a mess, so full of preposterous plot holes it’s a miracle its muscle-car star can maneuver anywhere around them, much less speed along like a magic, 200-hp bullet as it evades armies of policemen and avoids hitting hundreds of pedestrians.

The movie’s so focused on revving its engine, in fact, it lets story details and everything else slide. It certainly doesn’t have time to waste on its characters. Only Hawke’s has a proper full name, and it’s a testosterone-oozing doozie: Brent Mangra. Gomez is simply The Kid, Voight is known only as The Voice—and seen, until the very end of the movie, only from the back of his head or from his nose down. When the credits roll, with the exception of Mangra’s wife and her first name, everyone else is a Henchman, Thug, or Driver.

I didn’t get why The Kid tells Mangra “That was awesome!” after one adrenaline-pumping close call, then the very next second later snaps at him, “I really, really hate you!” I don’t understand how shooting a guy on a motorcycle makes a whole train depot explode. And why couldn’t Jon Voight just talk in his regular voice?

At some point, certainly, somebody must have understood more about this movie that I did, including director Courtney Solomon, who obviously thought it was stylish and cool to make a movie that relied so heavily on footage shot from grill-mounted cams, fender cams, hood cams, dashboard cams and various other cameras in places too impractical or too dangerous to put a human operator.

There is, however, one very cool sequence, late in the film, from the perspective of the front of the Super Snake as it pursues another vehicle at high speed, maneuvering, braking, speeding up and slowing down through intersections and around other cars and trucks. It’s as simple as that, and it only lasts about 60 seconds. But it’s so strikingly different from anything else in the movie, and yet so much more thrilling, it made me wonder if it was shot and edited by another film crew entirely.

But after a while, it all becomes exhausting, a big clotted clog of fumes and dust and grit, inane dialogue, ridiculous plotting, and bent, twisted metal. And when Getaway was over, not only did I feel like I’d been dragged along for every mangling mile, I was grateful to be able to crawl away from the wreckage. I only hope Ethan Hawke, Selena Gomez, Jon Voight and the director can, too.

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine