I didn’t know whether I wanted to see this movie or not. The trailer wasn’t very attractive, and our local reviewer, Mary Pols, gave it a “D-“. Perhaps it was the conclusion of her review that decided me: … it is safe to assume that the intended audience for The Chronicles of Riddick is young and male. It must be summertime.”

There is something wrong with this? I’m no longer young, but I’m still male (like half of the human race), and while it’s not yet summertime, at least officially, it’s only a week short of it — and many people consider summertime a nice season. This is the same sort of relatively irrelevant putdown that Pols has used on occasion with other movies she didn’t like (“aimed at Nintendo players”).

Riddick (Vin Diesel), the same thuggish crook we saw in Pitch Black a few years ago, appears running across an ice planet, escaping from a group of merc bounty-hunters led by Toombs (Nick Chinlund). After single-handedly taking out every man in the band, he learns from Toombs that the bring-him-back-alive bounty was provided by the Imam of Pitch Black (Keith David), now resident with his wife and daughter on the planet Helion Prime, a sunny place with weird background colors. Riddick arrives on Helion Prime to confront the Imam, just in time to be caught up in the invasion of the planet by the Necromongers, a strange new version of a Church Militant led by the divinely inspired Lord Marshal (Colm Feore), who has some strange capabilities — he can yank souls out of bodies and move from one spot to another instantaneously. The entire planet is seized in one night, but in the chaos Riddick is recaptured by Toombs and a new band of mercs and carried off into space to be turned over to the authorities. Riddick somehow convinces them to take him to an escape-proof prison on the planet Crematoria, whose climate — as you may guess from the name — is unpleasant; the Imam has told him that this is where the girl Jack, now known as Kyra, from Pitch Black has ended up. A Necromonger ship chases Riddick to Crematoria and gives Riddick cause to take on the whole Necromonger fleet, with unexpected results that fairly beg for a follow-up film …

We probably won’t know for a hundred years or so whether this is Great Literature or not (I would guess not), but — a la Pols who states that the film “wants desperately to be dignified and Shakespearean” — I suspect that the hackmeister of late 16th century London would not be particularly ashamed of having scripted this film. There is action, there are some pretty good special effects (which the Globe Theater did not have at its disposal, back then), the story makes a certain amount of sense. Can one ask for more?

Gripes: mainly, the persons of the ship commander Vaako (another LoTR veteran, Karl Urban, who was once Eomer) and his wife Dame Vaako (Thandie Newton). Actually, Dame Vaako is quite understandable: she wants to be top Dame in the Necromongers. Vaako’s actions are, to me, less comprehensible — I haven’t yet figured out whether he was faithful to the cause or simply his wife’s puppet — or maybe a combination of both. Also, I kind of liked the bounty-hunter Toombs, and would like to see him come back later. He was left in a pretty bad position here, but at least we didn’t actually see him die, and we know that if Riddick were in that same situation, he at least would have no difficulty escaping from it. (“It’s an animal thing …”)

Not a bad film, overall. If I had to rate it on the same scale as Pols, I’d give it a “B-” or maybe a “B”. And, oh, Mary, if you’ve ever held a Mach 3 razor in your hand and looked at it straight on before applying it to your face (as I have), you’d never say that the Necromonger armor of overlapping scales, which permits a lot more freedom of motion than ordinary plate (though the technology of constructing it would also be far beyond that of medieval times), “calls to mind the Mach 3 razor” …