VIN DIESEL AS RIDDICK WITH BITCHIN' DIGITAL DEMON DINGO DOG

Intergalactic tough guy

This is a series, and I've come late to the game. Reddick, this pared down version, The Chronicles of Riddick: Into Pitch Black having been followed by The Chronicles of Riddick, and now just plain Riddick, aims to show us that all you really need is Vin Diesel. And it succeeds. Forget acting skill. What does that mean, in this context? There is something else. Something more elemental. Brawn and chutzpah give Vin a presence other actors would die for. Compared to Dwayne Johnson, Jason Statham, and older hulking action heros like Stallone or Schwarzenegger, Diesel has a je-ne-sais-quoi, a self-contained quality, like he doesn't have to prove anything.

I'd still frankly rather watch the man trade bander and chase cars with Brian and Hobbes, Mia, Letty, Roman, Han and the rest of the Fast and Furious crew -- and that street-racing good-buddies-and-babes franchise, about to go into its seventh iteration, is the more successful one by a clear global margin. But there have been a bunch of summer blockbuster sci-fi movies from Hollywood this year, some of them quite impressive in their own ways, and yet this one succeeds in making the rest look fussy and sissified by comparison. In a world of interplanetary travel and futuristic technology, it's still down to cojones and muscle. Riddick is, basically, a Beckettian space-age survival Western. With Vin's (happily sparse) deep, booming voiceover.

We need that voiceover at first, to dispel the loneliness. To start out with, Riddick, an outlaw over a decade on the lam, is marooned on a hostile planet. (The crowds of Furyans, Necromongers, and other sundry oddball semi-humans from the earlier "Pitch Black" "Chronicles" in the series have been ditched in this pared-down story -- except Riddick's still a Furyan, I'd guess, judging by the way his eyes glow in the dark.) If the ornate font of the opening credits doesn't tell you this is a Western then the desert and mountains of this red-orange sunburnt heavily digitalized landscape will. It's got air and water, but it's riddled with large venomous reptilian critters with little dinosaur bodies and tall, rearing cobra-like heads. And they are not friendly. Riddick refits a bit of exoskeleton (ouch), then self-injects repeated doses of the venom to immunize himself. Besides these poisonous amphibians, which he beats off with big bone shards, there are large, hyena-like wild dogs, and Riddick captures a small one and makes it his pet. But apart the loneliness and hostility of this environment, Riddick spies stormy clouds way off in the distance and sees something terrible coming: later we'll find out what. So he sends a kind of alarm message from a dormant space station and two space ships come for him.

Only he hides, because they know who and what he is and are there to capture him dead or alive. He has to cow them into submission. The fun of the rest of the movie is seeing how he does this. The twist -- structurally a somewhat inexplicable one -- is that at this juncture the point of view shifts. Riddick is hiding somewhere, playing tricks on the ten men and one tough lady, Dahl (Katee Sackhoff), who firmly states that her sexual activities do not generally include men. These folks fight it out among themselves. On one ship's team is the preening, nasty Santana (Jordi Mollà), so nasty he releases a female prisoner (Keri Hilson), then shoots her escaping, to "lighten the load" and because he was becoming too fond of her. The other ship is captained more reliably by Boss Johns (Matt Nable), who has history with Riddick: his son died at his hand, it appears, a decade hence. Though he's not the scumbag we find in Santana, his nature may contain seeds of the same failure of nerve that brought down his son. Others emerge rather well too. Moss (Bokeem Woodbine) seems like simply a more purely African--American version of Riddick. Most are bewhiskered and hulking, save for the more youthful and prettified Luna; but even Nolan Gerard Funk, who plays him, is a gynmast and diver. Riddick begins dispatching members of these two warring teams, without even being seen.

It comes down to two "nodes" that are essential to running the two space sips, which Riddick has mysteriously gotten hold of. And though the remaining crew members, despite their posturing, are afraid of Riddick, he shows them that it's the horrors that the gathering storm brings that they should really be scared of, and should make them leave and let him have one of the ships.

Vin Diesel is an inVINcible hero in Riddick. And this dark, macho movie is so intense and vivid that, if you give yourself up to it, it's over before you can say "Neanderthal." But I could have done without the vulgar language, the repetitiveness, and the long inexplicable abandonment of the main character in the middle.

Riddick, 119 mins., was written by David Twohy, based on characters created by Jim and Ken Wheat. Released in the UK 4 Sept. 2013, in the US 6 Sept. Metacritic rating: 48.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.