Riddick(2013)

As a fan of Pitch Black I was more excited than I probably should have been that the Riddick series was getting a new installment. Mildly disappointed after Chronicles of Riddick, I should have kept my expectations low, but something in the trailer made me believe again.
Riddick is plauged with awful dialogue, terrible CG and a lack of character development that leaves audiences wanting.
The films dialogue as previously stated, is atrocious, the actors deliver their lines with little to no conviction and there is a kind of mental dissonance between their actions and their delivery. It's almost as if someone forgot connect the mic and decided there wasn't enough time and they would edit in a recorded table read. The problem is not so much that the dialogue was cheesy, because this was an action movie and I expected it to be cheesy, predictable and a cliche like most action movies are, but that's sometimes what makes action movies great.
Remember when I said I liked Pitch Black, it's still true, I like that movie, but remember how Pitch Black is getting on in years? Yea me to, but you should watch it again because it holds up surprisingly well. Do you want to know what doesn't? This movie, the CG looks like it came out of a SyFy original TV series and I mean no disrespect to SyFy shows, because I watch some of them, but this movie, had a larger budget. The beasts on the planet were definitely serviceable, but once Vin Diesel gets his pet zebra/hyena/wolf/lion and whatever other animal hybrid, it's as if he is talking to a marker on a stick. All of the flight scenes are terrible and look like they came out of an FMV sequence from a PlayStation 1 game. If I were 12 and this movie came out 15 years ago I would have been pretty impressed, but it didn't, and I wasn't.
Speaking further on Riddick speaking to his pet hybrid creature, there is no development of the bond the two are supposed to share. So when (GIANT SPOILERS TO A MOVIE YOU SHOULDN'T CARE ABOUT AND ITS NOT EVEN REALLY A SPOILER BECAUSE YOU SEE IT COMING FROM MILES AWAY) this thing dies I didn't even care, because the movie let me know that it was going to die, because it's garbage. There wasn't a clear antagonist in the film so when (GIANT SPOILERS TO A MOVIE YOU SHOULDN'T CARE ABOUT AND ITS NOT EVEN REALLY A SPOILER BECAUSE YOU SEE IT COMING FROM MILES AWAY) the person you think is supposed to be the main antagonist of the film dies at about the half way point, you're left scratching your head wondering how the movie is going to have an hour of resolution.
Some of the enemy deaths almost make this movie worth fast-forwarding so you can see them, but I wouldn't even tell you to waste your time on that. Skip to the slide-cut scene (sword goes through something it looks whole for a couple of seconds then slides and falls off) and call it quits.
Riddick really has no redeeming qualities and be glad that I watched it so you don't have to. Riddick will probably see one or two more films as the end of the film has that open ended ending that I am beginning to hate in Hollywood, because sequels used to be delightful rather than expected.

My Rating: If you have a hankering for some Riddick pop Pitch Black in your preferred media player and watch it again and find that sweet spot between the fourth and fifth vertebrae