Chronicles of Riddick, The

So confident were David Twohy and Vin Diesel about the ambivalent, ambiguous antihero of 2000's Pitch Black, Richard B Riddick, that they've attempted to create a franchise for him in one fell swoop. The Chronicles Of Riddick is set five years after the action in Pitch Black, which saw Riddick, holy man Iman (David) and tomboy Jack escape from a planet riddled with hungry monsters. Also released in 2004 are a Pitch Black prequel in the form of videogame 'The Chronicles Of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay' and an anime, 'The Chronicles Of Riddick: Dark Fury', which bridges the gap between the two feature films.

Riddick is still a fugitive. When he foils the attempts of a mercenary (Chinlund) to capture him, he traces the source of the bounty - Iman and Aeron (Dench), an "envoy from the Elemental race". They tell Riddick about the Necromongers (snigger), an army on a religious crusade that is taking them across the universe. "If they cannot convert you, they will kill you," Aeron tells us in voiceover.

Riddick's place in all this is pretty minor - he's merely expected to save humanity. Of course, the lone wolf is nonplussed by this. When the Necros lay waste to Iman's world of Helion Prime, Riddick is captured and meets the boss - the sinister Lord Marshall (Feore), described by his officer Vaako (Urban) as "a holy half-dead who has seen the Underverse and returned with powers you cannot imagine." He also encounters Vaako's slinky, scheming wife (Newton) and religious chief Purifyer (Roache).

Escaping, then being captured by mercenaries, Riddick's taken to the hellish prison planet, Crematoria. Here he hooks up with Pitch Black's other survivor, Jack, who's now an attractive young psycho who calls herself Kyra and is played by a different actress (Davalos). Thanks to some wonderful inefficiency on the part of the rat-bag prison authorities and the greedy mercs - and some even more impressive lapses in storytelling logic - Riddick and Jack escape Crematoria. Cue predictable showdown with the Lord Marshall.

The levels of poppycock in The Chronicles Of Riddick are fairy impressive, but it's fair to say it's no worse than your average piece of Hollywood sci-fi. After all, with his second Star Wars trilogy George Lucas has lowered the bar so far with dumb plotting, one-dimensional characters, and illogical storytelling that there isn't much to live up to. It's just a shame that Twohy is guilty of the same crimes, considering how lean and efficient Pitch Black was.

This really is deeply silly stuff. There's Riddick's miraculous escape, for example. Or the lapse in logic that means several characters can run across the surface of a planet with 700C daytime temperatures simply because it's night - this place is like Mercury with a sore head, but they don't even needs helmets. But hey, scientific logic never curtailed classic pulp sci-fi (like 1930s Buck Rogers say), so what the heck.

One key flaw is the incessant focus on Riddick. Sure, he was an intriguing character in Pitch Black, but he's not that special. Diesel spends the whole time taking his goggles off, then putting them on again, and striking poses, while the film wastes a great actor like Dench in a woolly, expositional role (she provides 'useful' bits of narration like "In normal times, evil should be fought by good, but in times like these, it should be fought by another kind of evil.")

Blockbuster sci-fi isn't necessarily reliant on its story or characterisation though, given how much time, energy, and money goes into the production design and effects (the budget here was $100 million plus). The Chronicles Of Riddick excels in these areas, despite having strong whiffs of other genre films. Elements recall The Matrix sequels (the opening sequence features a hovering craft in dark underground spaces), The Lord Of The Rings (the hordes; some white-haired mysticism), Dune (the scale and exotic culture), Star Wars (the earnest daffiness; the stereotyping; the myth synthesis), Star Trek First Contact (the Necromongers' all-consuming crusade is reminiscent of the Borg), even derivative stuff like Equilibrium (Riddick takes on a whole room full of armed cop/soldier types in the dark).

The effects pretty much save the film from its own determined hokeyness. The arrival of the Necro armada on Helion Prime is impressive, while on Crematoria, the sunrise ignites the planet with tendrils of light and flame. The light moving across the globe is comparable to the Genesis sequence in Star Trek The Wrath Of Khan but bolstered by over two decades of progress in CGI techniques.