"The Chronicles of Riddick"

This plot-packed "Pitch Black" sequel -- starring, yes, Vin Diesel -- is thoroughly enjoyable, but not because it's any good.

By Andrew O'Hehir

June 11, 2004 | OK, let's review. Four years ago there was a little horror movie with a lot of bat-winged monsters, a planet plunged in darkness and a baldheaded muscleman with a goofy name and an amusingly deadpan manner. It was called "Pitch Black," and it was awesome. But if there's one thing that pop culture teaches us (and I'm not saying there is) it's that nothing is quite as damaging as success.

Now we get a sequel to "Pitch Black," sort of, that has almost nothing to do with the original picture. Its ingredients are many and various: a star and director who already seem like their pop moment might be receding in the rear-view mirror; a B-plus international cast; a bunch of costumes and props that look as if George Lucas commissioned them but decided they were too cheesy; expensive but not especially distinctive digital effects; some half-baked Tolkien-meets-"Matrix" mythological mumbo jumbo; Thandie Newton in a few really hot Bob Mackie-style gowns; fragments of warmed-over community-theater Shakespeare. I enjoyed it immensely, but not because it was any damn good.

The leading man of this movie -- and, of course, of "Pitch Black" -- is Vin Diesel, and what the hell happened to him, anyway? At first, Diesel's combination of tough-guy bravado and self-mocking hipster detachment felt like something fresh in the worn-out action genre. Audiences and critics alike ate him up in the blissfully stupid "The Fast and the Furious," one of those perfect summer flicks it just seemed wrong not to enjoy. After that, sadly, Diesel became a movie star, and there's nothing boring-er than that.

His self-aware shtick turned out to be a fragile and perhaps accidental thing; in the dismal "XXX," which tried to turn the mercifully brief "extreme sports" craze into a Bond-style movie franchise, he just acted like a dolt. Then came his moody, actorly turn in "A Man Apart," which nobody really wanted to see, including those who saw it. Tell the truth -- when you see that movie in the video store, your eyes glaze over. You sigh involuntarily. You move on to other things: USA originals starring Alyssa Milano in a camisole, one of the 30 movies in which M. Emmet Walsh plays a corrupt small-town sheriff, anything with Don "The Dragon" Wilson.

If Diesel's career seems to hang in the balance -- is he the new Schwarzenegger or the new Jean-Claude Van Damme? -- so does writer-director David Twohy's. Twohy had been hanging around Hollywood for a dozen years, banging out screenplays for big-money crapola like "G.I. Jane" and "Waterworld," before breaking through as a director with "Pitch Black." He capitalized on this success by making an underwhelming little thriller about a haunted World War II submarine ("Below"). It was basically "Pitch Black" underwater, and it sank without a trace, ha ha.

Now he and Diesel, with impeccable Hollywood logic, have tried to go back to their roots and cover them up at the same time. Instead of the claustrophobic, pulse-pounding nightmare of "Pitch Black," they've made the kind of overblown space opera where you're impressed by the sheer scale of the thing, and you're more or less enjoying the ride, but you're also laughing at all the wrong moments. Diesel can still command the screen; there are moments here when he prowls the overdecorated sets with his cartoon muscles and weird little shades, looking for all the world like a resentful tomcat, and your inner teenage boy will announce to you that whoa, that dude is cool.

Next page: Judi Dench, a woman named Kyra who used to be named Jack, and something called the "Underverse"