FILM REVIEW | 'CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK' A RIDDICK-ULOUS STORY

Vin Diesel will need better scripts than this to become the next big action hero.
By ROGER MOORE
ORLANDO SENTINEL
Poor Vin Diesel. He's staked his Hollywood career, his future fortune, nay his very right to call himself Vin Diesel (real name, Mark Vincent) on a "Battlestar Galactica" remake.
"The Chronicles of Riddick" is a messy, messianic slasher/blaster in the "Matrix Half-Loaded" tradition, all nonsense plot and baroque costumes, sets and special effects.
Vin's oiled and pumped up. He has the cool name. He growls the cool lines.
"It's been a long time since I smelled 'beautiful."'
He still wears the cool goggles. But "The Chronicles of Riddick" is not the intimate, humanistic, be-very-afraid-of-the-dark sci-fi fright-fest that "Pitch Black" was. That movie wasn't cheap. But this one is a budget-buster whose very extravagance overwhelms it.
The story
The chronicle begins with our murderous hero sprinting over a snow-covered planet where, wearing too much hair and too many rags, he's being hounded by mercenaries.
Turns out that the price on his head is a lot higher, now that these fanatics called "Necromongers" are running rampant in the universe, invading planets with their Trojan Army weapons, Trojan armor and Trojan-styled spaceships, forcing their captives to "convert or die." They're an intergalactic Spanish Inquisition.
And we never expect the Spanish Inquisition.
Riddick, it turns out, is a member of some race called "Furions," who are the only people brutal enough to resist the Necros. He is told this by a ghostly creature played by Judi Dench. Maybe that cool special effect kept her from having to share a set with Diesel, Colm Feore (Lord Marshall of the Necros), Linus Roach (of Priest) or Thandie Newton as the Lady Macbeth in the chronicle.
Diesel may yet live up to the "Next Action Hero" hype that attended both him and The Rock a couple of years ago. But Hollywood, which has done fine in creating characters for them, needs to find somebody to write these guys a script worth following.