Blind Spots

Blind Spots
by Ed Owens

The original appearance of Richard B. Riddick, the vision-enhanced serial killer from Pitch Black, was compelling, standing out amidst the small band of stranded eccentrics fighting to survive on a hostile planet and making Vin Diesel a star (a process that The Fast & The Furious would later cement). Now, four years later, writer/director David Twohy has returned to the silver-eyed anti-hero with a bigger budget, loftier ambitions, and a leading man who's no longer known only as “that guy from Saving Private Ryan,” and the stakes are much higher for everyone involved. Too bad The Chronicles of Riddick isn't up to the task.

Not content to have Riddick merely save another small band of misfits, Twohy has nothing less than the universe itself threatened with destruction in the form of the Necromongers, a race of religious fanatics on their own personal crusade. Moving from planet to planet, the Necromongers, led by the mystically empowered Lord Marshal, convert or kill every living thing in their path, leaving behind demolished shells. We know this, and everything else in the film, mostly because Judy Dench signed on as the elemental, Aereon, one of the most blatant expositional tools to be employed by a writer-director in some time. But even Dame Judi can't make sense of the film's pretentious back-story, a hackneyed mishmash of clichés that includes a gratuitous allusion to Lady Macbeth in the form of Thandie Newton's Dame Vaako.

Given the budget of more than $100 million, the film looks surprisingly bad, with heavily borrowed set design and poorly composited green screens. Even worse is Twohy's heavy-handed attempts to mythologize Riddick, making him more of a superhero than he was in the original film. Vin Diesel swings across cliff faces, survives remarkable temperature extremes, and single-handedly dispatches groups of heavily armored enemies in stroboscopic flashes that will leave even the audience wondering what the hell happened. The humanity that made Riddick a compelling character has been replaced by a superhuman prowess that eliminates any and all suspense regarding his eventual fate. When not trying to reinvent Riddick, Twohy slows the film to a crawl so Dame Judi can explain some more of the epic mythology that is clearly more complete in Twohy's head than on the screen. While Pitch Black worked mainly because of its tight focus, Chronicles fails precisely because of its lack thereof.

Chronicles ends predictably, especially given the script's nauseatingly repetitious foreshadowing, and presumably paves the way for a third film. Hopefully, Twohy will scale back a bit and return to the more confined type of narrative that worked the first time.

I recently saw an old clip of Bill Murray discussing his decision not to reprise the role of Bosley for the sequel to the turgid Charlie's Angels. He instead chose to go off and do Lost in Translation, citing his desire to do something a little more serious. I can't help but wonder what he's thinking now, given that he's decided to follow up his Oscar-nominated turn by providing the titular voice for the big screen appearance of the long running comic strip Garfield.

The Academy must be so proud.

Saddled with the all-too-obvious title of Garfield: The Movie, the film assumes a certain level of familiarity with the comic strip, but not so much that newcomers would be lost (one interesting thing is some of the changes made to the strip's lineup, like the recasting of Nermal, the world's cutest kitten, as a young Siamese cat). Joining Murray is Breckin Meyer as Garfield 's long-suffering owner John and Jennifer Love Hewitt as John's long-suffering love interest Liz, neither of whom are as long-suffering as the audience subjected to this mess. Even considering the film's anorexic runtime (especially in the current heyday of two and a half hour films), the story is barely enough to hold one's attention, much less bother summarizing in a standard review. Instead, the film opts for mindless filler like dancing animals, burping cats, and enough shots of Garfield's ass to make you wonder if animating his face was just too daunting a task. If Garfield succeeds at nothing else, it does manage to lull you into the false belief that it can't get much worse, moments before Murray launches into a maudlin musical number bemoaning the arrival of Odi, “New Dog State of Mind,” the reworking of which is the film's big grab at the otherwise elusive ring of cleverness.

The blend of animation and live-action is sloppy, but at least consistently so, leaving me to applaud the decision to cast Odi as a real dog -- two poorly animated animals would have simply been too much. I was never a fan of the strip, but I could at least understand its appeal on some level. The movie, by contrast, seems utterly devoid of charm, a blustery concoction of frenetic activity accompanied by Murray's drolly voiced, wholly witless commentary. The best I can say is that it wasn't necessarily any worse than I expected, but then again, my expectations couldn't have been much lower going in.