The Chronicles of Riddick (2004)

Review from ./hoopla.nu
Mark was so excited about this film. You should have seen him... like a schoolboy on the last day of term, or a Star Wars addict the day before the release of Episode 1. He even dressed up as Radha Mitchell on the day (not that this was a very successful illusion). The good news is that The Chronicles of Riddick is good, solid entertainment. We are thrust back into a similar futuristic vision, albeit with a higher budget than first time around. There are a few too many references to Pitch Black in Riddick. It's great to see such a...more

Review from imdb
A matter of taste

Just had fun watching TCOR and am pretty happy about it. Good action, great visual stuff. A worthy successor to Pitch Black, though the two films are hardly related. Vin Diesel does a good and convincing job at playing an action antihero. As usual, Judy Dench adds to the film, even though her role is small here. The story is pure pulp SF and is short and predictable but is refreshingly dark and (mostly) unsentimental. It actually also has some interesting bits and nice side stories as a (smallish) bonus. Bits and pieces have...more

Review from ./citypaper.com
If the title seems a little grandiose for a Vin Diesel movie, chalk it up to writer/director David Twohy's ambitions. Building out from Diesel's character as introduced in his taut little 2000 cult fave Pitch Black, Twohy sets out to evoke an entire new sci-fi universe, one in a which a horde of crypto-religious warriors with the unfortunately dorky handle of Necromongers are bent on converting or killing every living soul, unless the titular intergalactic supercriminal can stop them. Diesel's Riddick, who appears to hail from a planet where the natives speak exclusively in tough-guy zingers, is the least interesting thing...more

Review from filmblather.com
Starring Vin Diesel, Colm Feore, Judi Dench, Karl Urban, Thandie Newton, Alexa Davalos.. Directed by David Twohy. Rated PG-13. Pitch Black was a serviceable genre flick, an Alien clone that delivered what it promised and built a small fan base in the process. The Chronicles of Riddick, its purported sequel, is an entirely different animal: a virtuoso exercise in world creation, a plot-heavy epic that's like a breath of fresh air in a time when movie stars and high concepts pass for science-fiction. Vast, wildly ambitious and occasionally murky, David Twohy's film is an open challenge to those who go...more

Review from filmcritic
A befuddled attempt to give Vin Diesel his own franchise series – now that he’s ditched giving the XXX thing another whirl – The Chronicles of Riddick stomps onto screens with an attitude that’s somehow both obtuse and far too simplistic. This sequel of sorts to writer/director David Twohy’s Pitch Black takes one of that film’s sole survivors, the titular shaven-headed and silver-eyed criminal (Vin Diesel), and drops him into the middle of a byzantine interstellar conflict that’s about as easy to parse out as one of Frank Herbert’s Dune novels. At the start of the film, Riddick is being ...more