Riddick (2013)

One of my favorite movies ever is "Pitch Black." And I'm in the very small minority who didn't hate "The Chronicles of Riddick," despite it being a measurable step down. But then again, there are few places to go from greatness other than downwards. For the third installment, "Riddick," all I wanted was a fun, dumb, gory B-movie. I wanted it to get back to basics. I don't think that's too much to ask.

What did I get? Well, it certainly is a B-movie. It's certainly gory. It's got some elements of fun in it, for sure. It's stripped down and back to a very simple survival story. And it is most definitely, without question, really dumb.

But on the other hand, it does have a very sexy voice.

So why do I feel so empty afterwards? Why am I so disappointed in it? I'm not totally sure, but I think in the end my problem with "Riddick" is that the 'dumb' outweighed nearly everything else that was positive about it. This is a dumb movie with dumb, unlikable characters and a plot that's not exactly terrible but not exactly worth caring about. At least it's that way for the first two acts. When the third act comes along all of a sudden we get dumped into "Pitch Black" again out of nowhere, which would usually be a good thing, but here it's so jarring that it's really unwelcome. But more on that later.

"Riddick" is a direct sequel to "The Chronicles of Riddick," which I honestly found somewhat surprising, which finds our titular anti-hero (Vin Diesel) stranded on a backwater piece of nowhere which isn't the same planet from "Pitch Black" even though it looks just like it. What happened is both he and the Necromongers had had enough of each other pretty early in his tenure as ruler, so Karl Urban gets his little 40 second cameo and screws him over, foolishly thinking that a fall of a couple hundred feet and a cliff landing on him is enough to kill Richard B. Riddick.

Please. Riddick will do that and still choke a buzzard right afterwards. He doesn't even care.

After acclimating himself to the dangerous environment he's found himself in, we go through a montage of what must be a year or so as he survives on this rock. Coming across a mercenary station, he sends out a signal broadcasting his location, which sends a bunch of bounty hunters after him. While that would normally be a bad idea, he's intending to use these guys as a kind of taxi service to get him off the planet. And if they don't want to leave him a ship willingly, well he IS Riddick, so Plan B is simply for him to kill them all.

That's a big chunk of the movie, which consists of Riddick making complete chumps out of all the dumb mercenaries that are too stupid to understand that they are hopelessly outclassed or to attempt any kind of basic safety procedures like "Don't split the party." And while it was cool in "Pitch Black" to see him be a supreme bad-ass like that, by the time the third movie rolls around we know all this already. And frankly I have no idea why Riddick, who is capable of such absurd feats of invisibility and stealth so as to be under suspicion of being a wizard, doesn't just sneak on one of the ships, steal it, and leave. I guess then we wouldn't have the pleasure of dealing with the jackasses who make up the mercenaries/fresh meat.

Like this piece of septic run-off.

Jordi Mollà plays Santana, the weaselly leader of the first band of mercs, and he is without question one of the most insufferable characters I've seen in any film this year. He loses out to that carrot-eating piece of crap from "A Good Day to Die Hard," but it was a pretty close match. He comes across like Peter Stormare after being flushed down into a Tijuana sewer and coming back with a brain injury and even more indecipherable accent. He's one of those special characters that, while you're watching him, you're actively trying to understand why nobody is shooting him in the face. The character is that bad. And Mollà is so unwatchable that he makes professional wrestler Dave Bautista look like a pretty damn good actor in comparison. Allow your mind to process that.

Also in the merc group is Katee Sackoff, so that's a thing I guess. She's basically playing Fem-Starbuck again since that's a thing that she does since she's Katee Sackoff. She's fine, but it's really one of those 'neither here nor there' things. It doesn't matter that much, and it could have been anyone. And as far as tough blondes in this series goes, I assure you that she is no Radha Mitchell.

Oh, and the best part about her is how she's evidently a lesbian, and is forward enough about it to get in people's faces over it, but she ends up being Riddick's love interest at the end because he promised to RAPE HER at one point and then kills a bunch of people which evidently is a move that gets her all kinds of hot and bothered and ready for some heterosexual lovin'. Because that's how human beings work, right? And I'll bet you if we saw an interview with Katee she'd call her character "strong." Because all actresses playing horribly offensive characters say that in an effort to defend it.

I don't mean to go on a feminist rant, but what the actual hell?

At the end of the film, a whole bunch of monsters come out of freaking nowhere to kill off the rest of the chumps who Riddick hasn't gotten around to yet, and the movie becomes something between a remake of "Pitch Black" and any other movie that features a lot of aliens crawling out of walls and burly guys shooting shotguns into the darkness going "AAAARGH." It's not that it's particularly bad, in fact it's just average at worst, but the fact that it only takes up the last half hour or so makes it feel particularly rushed and frankly out of place.

I suppose there are some redeeming qualities. There are some stunning visuals if you can get past the comic book looking, CGI-heavy style. The gore is actually pretty effective and the right level of gratuitous (an especially nice change after the PG-13 of "The Chronicles of Riddick"). And there are plenty of moments that strike the pitch perfect note of enjoyable cheese, particularly with the dialogue. When lines like "Instead of Furya, we wound up someplace called 'not-Furya'" are being said with stone-faced seriousness by Vin Diesel in his earth-quaking baritone, it's hard to not find a bit of fun in it. And as silly as it sounds and admittedly is, Riddick gets a dog. Yup, that's a thing that happens.

"Well, I'd certainly say she had marvelous judgment, Richard, if not particularly good taste."

Those positive qualities being said, I can't really give much more than a slightly below average review for "Riddick." It's not that the fact that it's a B Movie is bad. But you can make a good B Movie (see "The Thing" or "Escape From L.A.") and you can make one that's not so good. "Riddick" just didn't have a good enough script or good enough characters to balance out the B factor. And it's especially noticeable when the first film in the series has already shown us how good a genre film starring this character can be.

Man, this trailer makes "Riddick" look so much better than it was...

THE BOTTOM LINE - "Riddick" has some entertainment value, but despite being the return to an R-rated creature feature (by the end), the story feels very insignificant, the characters are nearly all grating, and so much time is spent with them that by the time the monsters heralding the main event show up, it seems out of place and unwelcome. It's not technically a terrible movie, but it feels superfluous when you could just be watching "Pitch Black" instead.

Total Recall (2012)

Don't despair everyone. I have the solution to our troubles. A desk, a computer, a nail gun, and a stack of paper. That's all it would take to solve the remake epidemic.

Just hire a guy to sit at a desk all day. In front of him will be a big stack of paper. On each sheet of paper would the name of a film. All this guy would do would be to sit at that desk and go through the stack one by one, and sort them into one of two piles: the "Remake" pile and the "Leave it alone" pile. Using the computer to do research, he would determine where a movie belonged according to the following criteria:

A) Is the movie less than 20 years old?

B) Is the original film rated R? And if so, is the remake going to be PG-13?

C) Is the original generally recognized as a "good movie?"

If the answers to ANY of the above criteria is "yes," it automatically goes into the "Leave it alone" pile. If the answers are all "no," than it is acceptable to put it in the "Remake" pile. However, every time a piece of paper goes into the "Remake" pile, the guy has to pick up the nail gun and shoot himself in the leg with it. That way we can be damn sure that movie needed another go around.

"Oh man. This remake of "Clash of The Titans" better be awesome!"

I understand why they keep remaking movies since you know, less work is involved because being original takes effort. There's also the built-in audience demographic that go and buy a ticket out of shear morbid curiosity, only to find out that the remake is in 3-D, so they have to shell out $15 for a ticket. That way when the votes are tallied, and everyone decides the remake is a pile of woodchuck vomit, the studios have still made their money back. Brilliant. But of course it's our own damn fault.

That brings us to the remake of "Total Recall." You know, because that was necessary. Walking into the theater, there was really only one thing going through my mind over and over again: "Why can't they stick to remaking bad movies?" It's not like the original was some masterpiece or anything, but it was good! It's probably the smartest Arnold Schwarzenegger movie ever made. What am I talking about, probably? It is the smartest movie he was ever in.

Seriously, I really like "Total Recall" and movies like it. By "movies like it" I mean any kind of movie that can have massively different interpretations depending on who you talk to. Remember when you realized that it's possible that Quaid is dreaming everything past the point where he sits in the chair at Rekal? Didn't that just blow your mind? But what's great is that it's just as likely that he's not dreaming. It's really up in the air, and you can dissect it for days and still not have a definitive answer. It's like "Blade Runner" in that regard.

And let's not forget the practical effects in "Total Recall." As unintentionally hilarious as the "explosive decompression" scenes are, those are some awesome effects that are actually happening in front of the camera. And it's not only the eyes bulging out of the head stuff, either. There's Arnold pulling the tracking device out of his nose, the exploding lady disguise, Kuato coming out of the dude's stomach, and let's not forget the immortal three-breasted hooker. "Total Recall" was really one of the last movies to really do this kind of thing to this extent.

So what's the deal with the remake? Will we see models and lots of cool makeup work, or overly-flashy fake looking CGI? I'll give you two guesses, but you'll only need zero because the answer is obvious OF COURSE THEY CGI'D THE CRAP OUT OF THIS MOVIE. But that's merely the beginning of this conga line of betrayal.

I feel ya, man.

Oh man. This freaking movie. I barely know where to start. Now, I will admit to never reading the short story "Total Recall" is based on, called "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale." I can't say whether it was more faithful to the story than the Schwarzenegger film was, but just 15 seconds into the film, I gotta tell you, I was ready to leave. This story is just plain dumb, and if that's how the original was, the changes they made in Arnie's film made it waaaaay better.

In the remake of "Total Recall," there are only 2 inhabitable places left on the planet: Britain and Australia. In what I can only assume is meant to be an allegory to history, Britain rules over Australia, or "The Colonies" as they're called. Subtle. Bryan Cranston is Vilos Cohaagen, who is either the ruler of Britain or simply an obscenely wealthy man who moonlights as a warlord, and wants to take over the world (ie - Australia). Anyways, for reasons of fast transport as well as establishing and maintaining control, Britain and Australia are connected by...oh god I can't believe I'm typing this...gah...a tunnel that has been drilled through the core of the Earth to connect the two countries. I'll let that sink in.

Ow. My brain.

Do I even need to explain to you in how many ways that is insultingly stupid? First of all, it's called "pressure" and "heat." Look it up. Second of all, who in the hell built it? And how? Did they hire Delroy Lindo and Hillery Swank? Thirdly, in the CENTURIES it must have taken to dig it, even if it were possible, which it isn't, how was it financed? That would have bankrupted the world thousands of times over. And don't tell me it's like "Star Trek" where money doesn't exist anymore because we clearly see money, which has Barack Obama's face on it now. Because they would totally have American currency since in this movie AMERICA DOESN'T EXIST ANYMORE.

Why couldn't they just build a transport on the surface of the planet? They have hover cars and all kinds of crazy technology, and you're telling me that the best idea they had was to pull a Bugs Bunny, take a wrong turn at Albuquerque, and wind up on the other side of the planet? And I'm talking about this from a perspective of it NOT being physically impossible, which it is. I mean, heat and pressure aside, do you have any idea how fast they were traveling? We see in the beginning of the film that it takes less than 2 hours to go from one side to another. That's nearly 4,000 mph. That's quite the brisk clip, I'd say.

But lastly, as I pointed out to my friend Stephen as we watched the film, even if they could magic the damn thing into existence overnight, the whole thing would be rendered useless in under a decade. I just leaned over to him and said "Dude, Steve, continental drift."

That's right. Tectonic plates move, and there's nothing you can do about it. And I'm guessing it wouldn't take too much change in alignment to make that tunnel through the Earth unusable, especially at the mind bending speeds they're going at. One little hiccup in the line and it's good night for everyone involved. I can't be the only one troubled by this stuff, can I?

Can you believe I'm only 15 seconds into this movie? I've been ranting like a madman about this and I'm 15 seconds in. Good gravy, I'd better cut to the chase.

In all honesty, I was actually entertained by the first half hour or so of the new "Total Recall." It begins much like the original, so it isn't surprising to have that be the best part of the movie. Colin Farrell however, as much as I can enjoy him in a role, just doesn't possess the shear charisma that pours off of Schwarzenegger. As passable of a job as Farrell did, and I would call it passable, I just spent most of the movie missing Arnie.

::sigh:: "I remember when Arnold used to shoot a big gun one handed..."

The biggest problem with the new "Total Recall" is that it's just so stock. I swear, if you hadn't watched the first 20 minutes, and just walked in without knowing the setup, I really don't think you'd possibly peg this as a "Total Recall" remake. I believe you'd think you were watching "Conspiracy Laden Sci-Fi Action Movie #689." That's what was great about the original: it had a uniqueness to it that helped it stand out from the standard schlock. A lot of that came from the fantastic effects work, but it also because it played a lot more with the idea that this is almost entirely in Quaid's head.

The new "Total Recall" really kind of forgets about that whole thing pretty early on. In fact, I realized near the end that for the last 40 minutes or so, I had totally forgotten about it. It really had just degraded into a loud, dumb, explosion with no real point. It was like I was watching a Michael Bay movie with less racism. Now, there were action beats in the original that momentarily got away from the mind-screw aspect of the story, but they had laid it on thick enough in the beginning to really help it carry over through the rest, so that you were still thinking about it after Arnold got done punishing traitorous cabbies with a drill. This movie though, they didn't even try.

I asked Steve after we left the theater the question, "If you had never seen the original, would it have occurred to you at any point that the whole movie was a dream the moment after Colin Farrell sat in that chair?" He thought for a (quick) moment and said "Nope. I never would have gotten that."

About the only thing in the film that alluded to Farrell dreaming was an advertisement for Rekal on a big billboard right at the very end of the film, as Farrell smugly contemplates his victory. I thought it could have been like an end credits roll for his dream, kind of like "This has been a Rekal production." Steve thought I was probably giving the movie too much credit. Steve is a smart man.

I know you're not going to believe this, either, but I have not begun to get mad at this movie yet. Oh no. There was something in this movie that was so awful that I literally have no idea how it made it past the preproduction stage. It has to do with casting, but not for the reasons that you might initially think, even though nobody involved is a paragon of acting. I'm referring to the casting of Jessica Biel and Kate Beckinsale. Jessica plays Colin's love interest and Kate plays his "wife," who functions as one of the main antagonists.

Take a look at these two ladies.

Kate.

Not Kate.

Hey, "Total Recall." Want to know how to make your movie needlessly confusing to the point of unwatchability? MAKE YOUR HERO AND VILLAIN LOOK NEARLY IDENTICAL TO EACH OTHER!

To begin with, they look like they could be sisters already. Then they are given the exact same hair cut, and they both wear dark clothing which looks the same. And this isn't a situation in which they do anything with it, they just happen to be played by two actresses that look like identical twins, and nothing about it is ever mentioned. I cannot tell you how frustrating that is.

I lost count of the number of times I was momentary befuddled because I thought Kate Beckinsale had switched sides and was helping Colin Farrell. It got to the point were I was asking Steve nearly every 10 minutes "Is that his wife or his girlfriend?" The most he could say was "I have no idea." And what blows my mind about this is that it would have been roughly the EASIEST FIX IN THE UNIVERSE, and it's called "bleach." Give one of them blonde hair or something. Or a wig, if they didn't want to do that. This isn't difficult, people, for love of Crom. Hell, just CGI their hair another color. You CGI'd everything else.

The funniest part of the whole "Are you Kate or Jessica" debacle was a scene that was so gloriously incompetent while proving my point in such full, intimate, and unflinching detail that it almost made the frustration worth it. It occurs right at the very end of the movie, after Cohaagen and presumably Kate Beckinsale have both been vanquished. Ferrall wakes up in an ambulance to see Biel sitting there, saying that they won. She then kills an orderly and is about to kill Farrell, because it's not Biel, but Beckinsale.

You see, in trying to tie in things from the original, they had to put in that disguise that Arnold had (you know, the fat lady with the exploding head), only this time, it's a hologram that goes over your head. Well, Beckinsdale got a hold of one of these things and used it to get to him. But the moment that she pulls the hologram collar off her head is priceless. As Jessica Biel is choking Ferrall, she yanks it off dramatically to reveal Kate Beckinsale!

And had I not seen the rest of the movie, I would have bet $500 it was the same damn person. It would have been hysterical had it not been pissing me off for two hours at that point.

I'm just so very tired.

You know, "Total Recall" is one of those movies that just makes me more angry the more I think about it. Apart from the simple reason that it just plain should not exist, the changing of the story in such a stupid way is just insulting to a great film that was a landmark in sci-fi.

THE BOTTOM LINE - While there is some admittedly good action in the first half hour or so, the fact it devolves into a by-the-numbers explosion-fest with a stupid plot by the end makes the remake of "Total Recall" just plain bad. What's worse is that it's unnecessary, and could stand as a monument to the perils of remaking good movies that didn't need fixing or updating. Just watch the original again. Skip this crap.