My Thoughts on “Riddick” (2013)

Note: 

This review was written from Tuesday March 3, 2026 to Monday March 9, 2026, before my 199th post and 200th post. Okay, well technically I did already start writing my 199th post before writing this one, but I haven’t written my 200th post yet since I’m waiting until I finish my 199th post to start working on my 200th. I also wrote this while I had no Internet 🛜.

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(This is the poster for Riddick (2013).)

 

Now I know what you’re thinking, why I am reviewing Riddick (2013) before either Pitch Black (2000) or The Chronicles of Riddick? Because this is only one that was available at Walmart, that’s why. If they had Pitch Black (2000), I would’ve gotten that, if they had The Chronicles of Riddick, I would’ve gotten that, but Riddick (2013) was the one they had. So I got it. To be honest, I originally wanted Anaconda (1997), that’s why I went to Walmart in the first place, to see if they had it on the steelbook because mistakenly believed that the 2025 Anaconda was already out on Blu-Ray 💿 and 4K 💿, and that would have the 1997 movie alongside it since that movie is so tied to that movie. But they didn’t, and I just chose to review Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus 🦈🐙 for my 199th post instead, and wait to review Anaconda (1997) at a later time, when I’m able to get it. 

My aunt said she would order it for me, but I’ve heard nothing from her so far since we had that long text conversation 💬 hashing out our political differences, working through my stress 😣 over our political differences. I wonder if she’s going to give it to me as part of my Easter basket 🐣🧺 on Easter 🐣. I guess I’ll find out when Easter 🐣 comes around. Get ready to eat plenty of Cadbury Creme Eggs 🥚 😋. But, I didn’t want to leave Walmart empty handed, and I wanted to actually buy something with the money 💵 my grandma gave me, she gave me $40 💵. So, the next day, after payday, we went to Walmart in Grants. I forget what the exact reason was, I think it was to get more Valentine’s Day ❤️ supplies for to her to make Valentine’s Day gift baskets ❤️🧺 and chocolate covered strawberries 🍫🍓, but when we went there, I went and bought the 4K steelbook 💿 of Riddick (2013) with the $40 💵 my grandma gave me. I spent nearly the full 40, it cost like 30 something dollars 💵. I barely had any left. 

But, I bought it because it was only movie that Walmart had on display that in any way appealed to me. Sure, there was Tales from the Darkness: The Movie, that horror anthology that George Romeo directed and Stephen King contributed stories to. The only reason I even know of that movie is that Brandon Tenold reviewed it on his show, and considers it the “real” Creepshow 3 because the actual movie called Creepshow 3 was pretty bad. In fact, it was more than bad, it was shit. But, I don’t have a ton of interest in watching and reviewing that, at least not at this time, and it’s not even on my list. But, this was, so I decided to buy it so I can finally get it over with, and cross it off of my list. I mean, can you blame me? The actual artwork on the steelbook is so badass. That’s one of the things I like about steelbooks compared to standard Blu-Ray or 4K releases 💿, the artwork on them is so amazing, way better than the artwork you’d see on a standard release. But once again, the thing I don’t like is how the discs 💿 are packed, or stored. The 4K disc 💿 is fine, it’s all on its own, it’s the Blu-Ray discs 💿 that are the problem. They’re stacked on top of each other, and you take them both out just to get the one you actually want to watch, and you have to be careful not to damage the other disc 💿. It’s ridiculous, who designed this? This is so impractical. 

Hey, steelbook designers and manufacturers 🫵, put the discs 💿 side by side with one of those plastic slider things that you turn like a page in a book 📖 (like they do on standard releases) from now on, instead of putting them on top of each other if you don’t want people to damage the discs 💿 while trying to get them out our put them back. It’s not that hard 😤! This release actually done by Shout! Factory, which I didn’t know about until I popped it into my PS4, and started watching it, and the Shout! Factory logo popped up, as well as the Scream Factory logo. I guess it makes sense, this seems a movie Shout! Factory would do. Don’t know why they released it under their Scream Factory label though, this isn’t a horror film. I mean, it’s got horror elements to be sure, but it’s not a full on horror movie. It’s more of a sci-fi action thriller, with a lot more emphasis put on thriller than action. If you read my Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus 🦈🐙 review, which will hopefully be up by the time this goes up, then you already know what it looks like. But in case you didn’t read that review, I will show a picture of it that I took here at the end of this review. 

I’m also reviewing this now because, if you read my note at the very beginning, my Internet 🛜 is off. We got disconnected by our Internet 🛜 and phone provider, T-Mobile because we couldn’t make the payments on time, and we have this huge late fee that is holding us back, this massive past due amount that’s over $600 💵 at this point. As you could imagine, on the income that we live on, we can’t pay that off. So, we got disconnected. At the time of me writing this, it’s been two weeks since our Internet 🛜’s been off. I haven’t able to do much of anything. I haven’t able to go on YouTube, I haven’t been able to check emails 📧 on Gmail, and I haven’t been able to work on my blog. All I’ve really been able to do is just listen to music that I already bought and downloaded off of iTunes, the music in my vast iTunes library, and I’ve had to watch videos I downloaded off of YouTube, using various free YouTube downloaders and saved onto my Backup Plus. That’s really all that I have to keep me busy during this time when we have no Internet 🛜 at home. 

I wish I could play video games, but I don’t have a 4K TV, so I can’t hook up my PS5 that’s just been sitting in my closet since Christmas 2024 🎄, because the PS5 from what I understand will not work on a regular HD TV, it will not work with a TV only plays as high as 1080p. It has to be a 4K TV. Which makes sense because the PS5 that I have at least has a built-in 4K players, the discs used for PS5 games is based on 4K discs 💿. So, everything has to be 4K 💿 for it to work properly. My aunt also didn’t get me any new games for my Switch 1. I was hoping she would, I’ve been really wanting to play Princess Peach: Showtime! and Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, since that game is available on both the Switch 1 and the Switch 2, just in case you’re broke like me and can’t afford a Switch 2. But, she didn’t get my any Switch games, and I think I put some of my Christmas list 🎄 that I wrote to her. I still have it in my notebook 📒, my real notebook 📒 I mean. I checked, and yes, I did have Princess Peach written in there, but not Metroid Prime 4, dammit! I should’ve wrote it in there, even if she probably wouldn’t have gotten it for me anyway. 

Speaking of Metroid Prime though, I wrote a review of the remastered version of the first Metroid Prime game, Metroid Prime Remastered, and in that review, I said that Katee Sackhoff would’ve been a good Samus, back in her younger days. Certainly not Katee Sackhoff now, she’s probably too old for the role unless they were specifically going to an older Samus, which I doubt they would, especially for the first movie out. But she had the right look and the right attitude, and she likes science fiction. I think she could’ve pulled it off. If they had made that John Woo Metroid movie back in the day, or if they got Alex Proyas to direct a Metroid movie after he made that live action commercial the original Metroid Prime on the GameCube, they definitely should’ve cast her. Either her, or Radha Mitchell, those would probably be my top picks to play Samus if they had a live action Metroid movie in the late 1990s or early-to-mid 2000s. I really don’t know who’d they cast now, probably Brie Larson since she’s talked about wanting the role for a long time, and she’s a big enough name to where they would consider giving her the role, even if the Internet 🛜 would inevitably moan and groan about it 😒. Or maybe they would cast a newer up and coming actress who we aren’t thinking of yet, but will cast because she’s promising young actress and fits the role perfectly, embodies the role so perfectly, that, if the movie’s a huge success and people actually like it, then it’ll make her a huge star, and she’ll become synonymous with that role. People will ever really know her as Samus. 

I just thought I would mention that since Katee Sackhoff is in this movie, and Radha Mitchell herself was in a Riddick movie. She was in the first one, Pitch Black (2000), later known as The Chronicles of Riddick: Pitch Black because The Chronicles of Riddick came out, and the whole franchise is called The Chronicles of Riddick. Even though only two of the movies are called The Chronicles of Riddick. I say two because, if you ignore the alternate title for the first movie, the only two Riddick movies that have the name The Chronicles of Riddick as part of their title are The Chronicles of Riddick (the namesake of the entire franchise) and The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury, which was an animated short film meant to tie into The Chronicles of Riddick. But this movie dropped that whole Chronicles of Riddick thing and just called it Riddick, Riddick (2013). Even the next one isn’t going to called The Chronicles of Riddick, it’s just going to be called Riddick: Furya, following this movie’s titling convention of just calling them Riddick. Man, I am going to be writing Riddick so many times throughout this review, someone should do a counter to count how times I wrote the name Riddick in this review. And do the same for when I review the other movies. I would say do a drinking game, but I don’t drink and I don’t condone drinking. Plus, from what I understand, drinking games are way less fun if you’re reading rather than hearing or seeing something be repeated so many times. 

I would even say Katee Sackhoff when she did this movie would’ve been perfect. I doubt very many would a problem with her casting. Especially how she is here because she bulked up considerably for this role as Dahl (which I’ll get to her name later and why it has so much significance for me), so that she could sort of match the guys ♂︎ here, because she definitely couldn’t match them in height most of them. I saw the interview she did for this 4K release 💿 by Shout! Factory (or I guess Scream Factory to be more technical), and she stated that she isn’t that tall, she’s only 5’5”, and almost every male actor ♂︎ in that movie towered over her except for Jordi Mollà, who I will get to soon enough. I’m probably taller than her, I’m definitely taller than her I should say. So, what she didn’t have in height, she made up for in muscle 💪. She wanted to make sure that physicality wise, she belonged with this group of men ♂︎, this group of mercenaries. I mean, really it’s two groups of mercenaries who are competing at first, when they first met, and they have to team up together to capture Riddick because he’s a guy ♂︎ that’s difficult for just one group of mercenaries or bounty hunters to try and capture. You need two ✌️, and they need to work together. But more on that when I actually start reviewing the movie. This is just the intro part, just bear with me. 

I do occasionally get to use Wi-Fi 🛜 when we go to the nearby McDonald’s or to the casino (usually Sky City Casino Hotel), because my grandma feels bad for me that I don’t have Internet 🛜 so she takes me to these places that have free Wi-Fi 🛜, but that’s very seldom. We don’t get to go everywhere. We don’t want to waste gas ⛽️ just so I can go on my laptop 💻 and my phone 📱 and watch YouTube or whatever. And even when we do go, we only stay there for an hour or so, because you can only stay there for so long. It’s not like you can stay there all day even if I would like to. This is kind of why I wish I could visit my cousin’s house in Albuquerque, near the Sandia Mountains on Foothills, not just so I can see my nephew again, but also so I can use their Internet 🛜. I’m sure they’d let me. I could be on my laptop 💻, doing whatever, while my grandma plays with the baby and talks to my cousin and his girlfriend. They haven’t offered it, but I’m sure if I asked about it, they’d say yes. I’m hoping my aunt can pull through and help us reconnect our Internet 🛜 somehow, either by helping my grandma get on the senior plan which is a lot cheaper than the standard plan that we’re currently using, or she just pays it to have it reconnected. Because she’s got another one of her pottery shows coming up, and she makes a lot of money 💵, she usually helps us out. She usually hooks us up 😉. 

I haven’t had a ton of opportunity to work on my blog since our Internet 🛜 got shut off, mostly because I’ve just been focusing on downloading more videos off of YouTube for me to save onto my Backup Plus to watch later back at home (mainly video saved in my Favorites playlists and videos I’ve wanted to download onto my laptop 💻 but never got around to it). I can’t continue work on my 199th post because I have to watch the movie first, and there’s no way I can watch that full movie in the limited time that we have to stay at these places. And I can’t start work on my 200th post because I need to be able to watch it and I can’t steam the damn thing at home because our Internet 🛜. I had an opportunity to watch Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus 🦈🐙 the day before our Internet 🛜 shut off, and had I watched it that day, I could’ve finished writing it in the Notes app on my phone 📱, and then cut and pasted what I wrote onto the draft in Blogger, and then published it when I was connected to Wi-Fi 🛜. At least then I would have one review done, and had another post on my blog for the year so far. 

So far, because I’ve been so held up working on my 199th post and 200th post, I only posted one post ☝️ this whole year so far, and that’s the Venezuela one 🇻🇪, the one I wrote the day after Trump invaded Venezuela 🇻🇪 and kidnapped Nicolás Maduro and his wife. That was my reaction to what happened. That’s the only post I managed to publish in the month of January, and in all of 2026 so far, and now we’re in March at the time of me writing this. Had I watched Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus 🦈🐙, and finished writing the review in my Notes, I could’ve gotten my 199th post over with it, and had a second post for 2026. Just so people wouldn’t think that my blog is a dead blog. It’s not, it’s just been put on hiatus indefinitely. But no, I chose not to watch it, and now look where we are. That’s what I get for procrastinating I guess. I just happened to pick two movies that require Internet 🛜 for me to watch them. If I had physical copies of these movies, Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus 🦈🐙 and The Simpsons Movie, I would’ve been able to work on those reviews while my Internet 🛜 was off. 

But I can’t, so those reviews are stalled, I can’t work on them at this time. I did at least get two blog posts done before our Internet 🛜 was shut off. My review of Greenland 2: Migration 🇬🇱 and my second and possibly final post on Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. I haven’t published them yet obviously, I’m waiting until I publish the 199th post and 200th post to actually publish them, but I did actually write them. They are good to go 👌. Also, about Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, my suspicions were correct about that movie because it after it came out, it has largely been ignored and forgotten about. Hardly anyone talked about it as far as I can tell. The only big time critic who actually reviewed it was Jeremy Jahns, because of course he would review a movie like that. He gave a pretty glowing review, but he’s just one critic out of many, and I don’t always trust his instincts or agree with his opinions. Double Toasted 🍞 didn’t even make a video about that movie. They skipped it and went straight to Scream 7, which has gotten pretty terrible reviews, despite doing pretty well at the box office despite the limited advertising and controversy surrounding the firing of the previous lead actress over Palestine 🇵🇸. 

While Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die probably got mixed reviews, it seems like the kind of movie that would get mixed reviews, it probably didn’t do well at the box office since it seems hardly anyone saw it. I would not be surprised at all if it turned out that Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die bombed at the box office 💣. The marketing wasn’t great, in fact outside of the first trailer, it was pretty bad and pretty limited, much more limited than Scream 7’s marketing. And I also think it’s just as one comment I saw said, people are just sick of AI movies, as in movies about AI, not movies made with AI but people hate that too 😤. When you’re so inundated with AI in real life, when you’re so aggressively advertised it, when it appears on the news, when it’s the topic of discussion pretty much everywhere you go on the Internet 🛜 and even in real life, and you’re recommended that were made with AI, or you see posts on social media made with AI, you really don’t want to see movies about AI. That’s part of the reason why people didn’t like Mercy (2026), that screen life AI movie starring Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson and directed by the same guy ♂︎ as War of the Worlds (2025) starring Ice Cube. That’s not only reason why people don’t like Mercy (2026), but it’s one of the reasons, one of the big reasons. It feels too real, it feels too close to home. It feels too mundane I guess. 

Though there’s nothing mundane about AI, and the moment we accept it as AI as mundane or as normal, is when we lose the war. Not a literal war, but a war of ideas, a war of words, to see whether AI belongs in our future or not, and if it has any real benefit to us as a species. It doesn’t, that’s my answer, and many other people’s answer. I will not bow to AI, I will not accept it in my life, no matter how much these tech companies try to push it on me, or how much these apologists on the Internet 🛜 try to argue its merits or call anyone who opposes it “luddites.” That’s always their go-to insult, they call us luddites, even though we’re not against technology, if we were wouldn’t be using the Internet 🛜, we just oppose this particular technology. I think anyone who actually likes technology and understands it, can recognize if a technology is good or bad, and right now, AI is bad technology that shouldn’t be pursued further or pushed onto the public so aggressively by the tech companies. Plus, luddites from what I understand were not actually “anti-technology” or “anti-progress.” 

They were protesters 🪧 trying to advocate for workers’ rights during the Industrial Revolution. But, the industrialists, being against workers organizing in such a way, slandered them and made them seem like they were anti-technology and hated progress. And now the tech companies and their simps online are doing the same thing to us, just because we oppose AI, and we oppose how it’s being used, and what it’s doing to our society and to our environment. AI is killing our planet 🌎, it’s damaging the environment, and contributing to climate change, or exasperating the problems that are caused by climate change. We cannot let them win this time just like the industrialists won with the Luddites and slandering them and lying about their viewpoints. I wish I had saved that comment, and took a screenshot of it, that was such a good comment. It was on Stephen Colbert video I believe, or was it on a Seth Meyers video 🤔? Either way, it was on one of those. 

But, I need to be able to do something. Something to keep me busy, keep me productive, and keep me from getting bored. Because it does get pretty boring not being able to use the Internet 🛜, watch YouTube videos all day, or stream movies and shows on my PS4, or even play video games. I guess I could play some of my older games, but I don’t really feel like it. I have to really in the mood for to replay an old game that I’ve already played. Like, I played Super Mario Odyssey a few years ago, in either 2022 or 2023, and I would take me another year or so for me to want to play it again. It took me so long to finish the first time, and it was so hard in places (it was a pain in the ass in some parts), that I’m just not ready to go through it again. Same goes for Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker ⛏️🪎 and Super Mario 3D World. Maybe I would be willing to play Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope again. That was a fun game to play, and it was a breeze, much breezier than Super Mario Odyssey that’s for sure. It had its difficulties, but the difficult parts of Sparks of Hope were nothing compared to the difficult parts of Odyssey, trust me. And I guess I could play Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and the Nickelodeon Kart Racers games because those don’t have stories and don’t take a lot of commitment, but I don’t really like playing those either…yet. Maybe if I get really desperate for entertainment I’ll play those games. 

So, watching and reviewing Riddick (2013) is the next best thing. It’s a new movie (it’s an old movie actually) that I hadn’t seen before, and it was on my list of movies, shows, and games to review. This was my first time watching one of the Riddick movies in full, and I gotta say, I quite enjoyed it. I’m glad that this particular adventure was my introduction to everyone’s favorite Furyan. I will say that this is the first review I’ve done in a while where I didn’t write any notes beforehand, and went in completely fresh. I mean, I did write notes, but I didn’t write until after I started watching the movie, I’m talking notes I wrote way in advance long before I ever sat down and watched the movie. I haven’t done in a while, not since Greenland 2: Migration 🇬🇱, which was, over a month ago now. I would also like to point that I watched the Unrated Director’s Cut of Riddick (2013), so keep that in mind while you’re reading this because some of things I saw in the movie and write about in this review might not be the same for you. Like, if you’re one of the people who saw this movie in the theater when it came out in 2013, you might’ve had a different experience with this movie than I did watching the Unrated Director’s Cut at home on Blu-Ray 💿. 

I have other movies in my collection that are on my list too, but I don’t really feel like reviewing those at this time. Like, with playing old games I’ve already played, I have to really be in the mood to rewatch a movie or show that I already watched before. Even if it is just for a review. Like, that’s what kept me from reviewing either Cowboy Bebop (1998) or Outlaw Star, I just wasn’t in the mood to rewatch either of them, even if it was just for a review. Plus, I had another shows I wanted to review first before I got to those, like Lilo & Stitch: The Series, or Skull Island, or Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix, or Terminator Zero, or Chief of War, or Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2, which came out last Friday. I watched reviewed Season 1, I gotta watch and review Season 2. But because I can’t watch any of those shows because I don’t have Internet 🛜, I now have all this free time to rewatch Cowboy Bebop (1998) and Outlaw Star and write reviews for them. In fact, after this review, if our Internet 🛜 isn’t back on by next week, or the week after, I’m thinking of rewatching Cowboy Bebop (1998) and Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, and making that the next review I write after this one. I’ll just have to see it how it goes, and how long it takes me to write this. 

One exciting that I would like to let you know about since I’m writing this advance before any of these go up is that I wrote a short story, an honest to God short story. Haven’t done that in a while. It’s called Bed Bugs, and it is as the title suggests, about bed bugs, specifically, giant bed bugs. Bed bugs the size of abalone shells. You’ll know about it when you read it when it finally goes up on here. I will be adding a short story section to this blog, and when I do eventually start writing longer form stories, I’ll create a long form story section too. But for now, I’ll just have a short story section. If I come up with any more ideas for short stories while our Internet 🛜 is off, I’ll be sure to write them. I can’t just think about writing them, or talk about writing them, I have to actually write them. If you say you’re going to do something you better do it, that’s the motto I have to start living by because I don’t get any of the things I want to accomplish done. 

My procrastination will just continue to get in the way. I have some ideas floating around in my head, but nothing solid yet to where I could start writing one right now. I’m still just thinking my bed bugs story, and getting that published, and then maybe expanding upon it in a longer form story. I really wanted to start off 2026 swinging, but I ended up starting the year off pretty slow. Some of it was because of things that I did, or rather, things that I did not do, but some of it was because of things that were completely out of my personal control. The Internet thing 🛜 for one, if our Internet 🛜 was still on, I would’ve been able to get so much more done than I’ve been able to with it off. But, that’s just how it is some times. You gotta deal with it. Hopefully I can ramp things up as the year goes along, and by the end of the year, I’ll be posting much more consistently than I have at the beginning of the year. 

I realize that this is the third film in the series so far, and while it would’ve been ideal to start from the beginning with Pitch Black (2000), that’s just now how it worked out. This is how it has to be. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d watched a trilogy or a series in reverse. I watched the Dark Knight trilogy in reverse, I watched The Dark Knight Rises first, then The Dark Knight, and then Batman Begins. It’s not ideal, but there is a precedent for me to start a series off like this. It has happened before. And it’s not as if I completely went into this blind without knowing what I was in for, and it wasn’t as if I was confused while watching. I had a decent grasp of what happening, and what these character dynamics were without having seen the other Riddick movies. Like, I didn’t need to have watched Pitch Black (2000) to understand what Boss Johns’s problem with Riddick was, because it was in here in the film, they gave enough information for to get the gist without needed to watch the first one to understand it. Same thing with the Necromonger stuff at the beginning and at the end, they give enough information in this film to be able to follow along without having watched The Chronicles of Riddick beforehand. Okay, the end part is a little bit hard to understand, with happening to Vaako, but from what it seems, he entered some kind of transition where he’s neither dead or alive, but something in-between, or something beyond life or death. That’s why he talking about transcendence, and why the movie ends with that line of him saying transcendence before it weirdly goes to end credits without any music. 

That’s one thing that kind of baffled me while watching this movie is the end credits had no music on them. I had never seen that before, a movie that had no music over the end credits. Usually they have music over the end credits, which give you the chance to hear the isolated score without any of the sound effects or people talking over it, or you get to hear an original song they specifically made to put over the end credits, usually one sung by an outside artist they brought in to provide a song for the movie and its soundtrack. The only time when they don’t have music over the end credits is if it’s a lower budgeted film, or it’s a documentary, or if it’s a foreign film. But, if it’s a fully domestic film, they usually have music over the end credits. Just so you’re not looking at a silent black screen with huge wall of text scrolling up. But, this is the first mainstream movie that I’ve seen where they didn’t have any music over the end credits. I don’t know if it was like this for the Theatrical Cut, I can’t imagine that it was because that would’ve been jarring for audiences to not having music play over the end credits. People would’ve probably thought something was wrong with the speaker system. So, I’m guessing this was just for the Unrated Director’s Cut. I don’t know why, it’s one of the weirdest creative choices I think of, but I guess 🙄. The only thing I can think of as to why the end credits would be like this is if there was an after credit scene they wanted to play after, but I highly doubt that this movie had an after credit scene, even for the Unrated version. 

Sure, there were MCU movies during this time, The Avengers (2012) had come out the year prior, Phase 1 had ended, and Phase 2 had kicked off the following year, in 2013, the same year this movie came out, with Iron Man 3, the third, final, and, in my opinion, worst Iron Man movie 😒. Shane Black did a piss poor job with that movie, bad Shane Black, bad 😤! They should’ve never picked you to direct The Predator 🤦‍♂️, or if that whole thing was your idea 🫵, then they never should’ve given you the greenlight. So, people were familiar with the idea of after credit scenes. But, they weren’t as common as they become later on in the decade, they weren’t ubiquitous. People weren’t expecting them like they do now because the MCU hadn’t fully taken over yet and conditioned them to expect an after credit scene after the end credits. And before other movies trying to reap the success of the MCU started doing the same thing. Keep in mind too, that this was before we started getting two Marvel movies a year. Sure, we got Iron Man (2008) and The Incredible Hulk (2008) the same year, and we got Thor (2011) and Captain America: The First Avenger 🇺🇸 the same year, but it wasn’t like later on when them releasing at least two movies a year was the norm. 

Sometimes, they would release three movies a year, it got crazy how many of those Marvel Studios was pumping out a year. I mean, they still kind of doing that now, but they have slowed down significantly, and aren’t releasing as many films a year they used to. Like, they only released two movies last year, in 2025, and they have two movies this year as well, Avengers: Doomsday, which is their big release that they’re pinning all their hopes on to save the franchise after the slump they entered after Avengers: Endgame, and Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Neither of which I plan on seeing because I’ve sworn off superhero movies, all of them. Doesn’t matter if they’re Marvel or DC, I will not see any more of them in the foreseeable future. I really didn’t want to wait to see if there was an after credit scene, just in case there wasn’t. Plus, it was late at night, and I wanted to watch the special features, and then take it out, put it back in the case, and then get ready for bed 🛏️. Anyone who has seen this movie multiple times, and waited to watch the end credits, and see what came after, please me know if there was an after credit scene or not, and say if I was correct in assuming that there wasn’t. 

Of course, I was plenty familiar with the Riddick series before I watched this movie, I knew of the franchise. I knew more about The Chronicles of Riddick than I did about Pitch Black (2000) or this movie before I watched it, because that was the one my dad and my sisters watched more often than the ones. They watched The Chronicles of Riddick way more than they watched Pitch Black (2000). So I was exposed to that movie more, I had seen more from it, and I knew more about the story of that one than Pitch Black (2000). In fact, there was a time when I thought The Chronicles of Riddick was the first movie, and Pitch Black (2000) was the sequel. But now I know better, and I know that Pitch Black (2000) was the first movie and The Chronicles of Riddick was the second movie. Even if they did rename Pitch Black (2000), The Chronicles of Riddick: Pitch Black after The Chronicles of Riddick came out, to make the movies seem uniform and like they were apart of the same franchise, and one continuous saga. That it was about the chronicles of Riddick, Richard B. Riddick, played by Vin Diesel of course. But then this movie came out, and dropped the whole Chronicles of part of the title, and just called itself, Riddick (2013). So, all that work for nothing to try to make these movie uniform and have the same title. I guess it was kind of hard to keep that up with this movie because Riddick’s name is the title. What would it have been called if they kept up the same naming convention? The Chronicles of Riddick: Riddick? 

It just wouldn’t have been worked, so I can understand why David Twohy just decided to call this one, Riddick, and the next movie, Riddick: Furya. Though with that movie, calling The Chronicles of Riddick: Furya would’ve worked perfectly, especially since it seems like Furya’s more than likely going to be the conclusion to the entire series. I mean, what else can you do with the character after he’s visited his home planet, and accomplished the one thing he wanted to accomplish? Find out where he came from, and find a family. Oh my god! Riddick’s become Dominic Toretto 🤯! Is Vin Diesel just going to keep playing characters that all about family in one way or another? I mean, I guess Xander Cage isn’t really about family all that much, but even in the third movie, XXX: Return of Xander Cage, he ended up getting a team, and it just became Fast & Furious lite. Xander just lost most of the defining features that made him different from Toretto. Hopefully Riddick will still feel like Riddick in Furya. Hopefully all those years of doing endless Fast & Furious sequels hadn’t dulled Vin Diesel’s acting ability, and his ability to play characters that were actually distinct from each other, and aren’t just variations of Toretto. 

Speaking of The Chronicles of Riddick, to truly understand why this movie was made, and why it is the way it is, you to understand The Chronicles of Riddick, and the reaction to it. The Chronicles of Riddick was a huge departure from Pitch Black (2000), not just in terms of the budget and scale of it, Pitch Black (2000) was this small independent movie, while The Chronicles of Riddick was this big budget studio movie, but in terms of what it was. Pitch Black (2000) was a sci-fi horror thriller, almost a creature feature even, about people being stranded on an alien planet 👽 and having to survive these alien creatures 👽 that want to eat them, and having to rely on this mysterious guy ♂︎ with superhuman abilities (who possibly isn’t human at all) who they see as a dangerous criminal. Just as dangerous, if not more than the creatures themselves. Though Riddick would argue that he wasn’t the one they had to worry about, the creatures were. While The Chronicles of Riddick was this big sweeping space opera epic, where Riddick takes an entire army of religious extremists, this cult called the Necromongers, that travels across the stars to try and spread their faith as far and wide as they can. Anyone who doesn’t embrace their faith is immediately killed, entire cities and planets wiped out simply for rejecting the Necromongers’s faith. There were space battles, shootouts, sword fights, guys wearing this cool looking armor that was completely unlike anything in Pitch Black (2000). Just a completely different animal from the first movie. Not even close to being the same genre really. 

Not only that, but The Chronicles of Riddick was rated PG-13, while Pitch Black (2000) was rated R. And a lot of people didn’t like that, people felt it was too much of a departure from the first movie, and they certainly didn’t like it was rated PG-13 and not R like the first movie was. The movie received mixed reviews, and it was a box office disappointment. But, there were certainly who liked The Chronicles of Riddick, not just years later after the fact but when it actually came out, 22 years ago in 2004, like my dad and my sisters, and in years since, it has gained a pretty strong cult following, just as much as the first one, and will defend it and argue and articulate its merits in a pretty intelligent way, not just saying it’s fun or they like it just because. And of course, the people that did like The Chronicles of Riddick were excited about this movie when it was announced, and were hoping to see more stuff that was from The Chronicles of Riddick, mainly the Necromongers, which were the big new element introduced in that movie that was unique to that movie, and set it apart from Pitch Black (2000). Like I said, the aesthetics of The Chronicles of Riddick, and particularly the Necromongers, was unlike anything that was in Pitch Black (2000). They are distinct films from each other, no way you’ll mistake one for the other. And I’m those people were happy when this movie did give them more Necromonger stuff, even if it was just at the beginning and at the end. 

So given that The Chronicles of Riddick wasn’t as well received as the first movie and didn’t make that much money 💵 given what the budget was, and given how they themselves weren’t really satisfied with the movie or weren’t satisfied with the experience making it because of studio oversight and studio interference, and are always wanting to please the fans, it was decided by David Twohy and Vin Diesel (who was a producer on this movie as well as on The Chronicles of Riddick and the upcoming Riddick: Furya) to go back to basics with the third movie, make a movie that was more similar to the first one. Another movie about a group of people being stranded on an alien planet 👽 with a bunch of alien monsters 👽 that want to eat them, and them needing to rely on Riddick to survive and possibly make it off the planet, despite them not really trusting him and seeing him as a dangerous criminal that needs to be eradicated. Only here, in Riddick (2013), it’s a group of mercenaries, two groups of mercenaries, one ragtag more scrappy group of mercs and one more organized and well equipped group of mercs with much fancier and sleeker equipment than the ragtag group of mercs had, and matching uniforms which the ragtag group didn’t have. And they specifically came to this planet to capture and kill Riddick, after he intentionally set off the beacon, a distress signal 🆘 to summon someone here to this planet so that he can hitch a ride on their ship to get off of this planet and go to his real destination, which is his home planet, Furya. Or perhaps steal their ship if they’re unwilling to bring him along. 

The ragtag group of mercenaries just want to kill Riddick, and put his head in a box, literally chop his head and put it in a glass box. While the more slick mercenaries want to capture Riddick, and keep him alive long enough to where their leader, Boss Johns can ask him some questions about what happened to his son, because he’s the father of one of the characters from the first movie, a character that died, Johns or Little Johns, who was a morphine addict and kind of a coward and an asshole willing to kill a kid, or let a kid die, to save his own skin. But, the father, Boss Johns doesn’t believe that his son was like that, that his son was capable of doing things like that, he’s in denial, and thinks that Riddick’s lying and that he just murdered him in cold blood. But anyone who’s seen the first one knows that Riddick’s telling the truth. Whereas in Pitch Black (2000), it was mostly a group of civilians who got trapped on the planet, and were at the mercy of bloodthirsty monsters 🩸 ready to eat them. This is probably more of what people were expecting when they heard that there was going to be a sequel to Pitch Black (2000) the first time, instead of what The Chronicles of Riddick ended up being, which went in a wildly different direction than Pitch Black (2000). Not only that, but it was decided to go independent with this movie rather than work with the studio, because Twohy and Vin didn’t like having to work under a studio, and constantly be given notes, and told what to do and what not to do. Which of course, meant a much lower budget than the second movie, which makes sense since is a much smaller scale movie compared to the second one. Even if it does show in some places, but I’ll get to that. And of course, it was rated R instead of PG-13 like the previous movie was. 

And it seemed to have worked because this movie was both received well better than The Chronicles of Riddick was, but it was an actual box office success, which The Chronicles of Riddick wasn’t. Granted, it was a moderate success, but still a success regardless. It grossed $98.3 million 💵 against its $38 million budget 💵. That’s pretty good 👍 for a movie like this, for a movie of this size and scale. I don’t know what David Twohy has directed outside of the Riddick movies, in fact, there was a time that I almost mistook him for Danny Boyle, the director of 28 Days Later, 28 Years Later, Trainspotting, T2 Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire, and Sunshine ☀️ (2007), and the almost director of No Time to Die, though when he was still on the project, it didn’t have an official title, and people were just referring to it as Bond 25. Just like what they’re doing now with the next Bond movie, Bond 26, which is being made at Amazon, whereas the other ones (with the exception of Never Say Never Again) were made independently by the Broccoli family, and their production company, EON Productions, which stands for Everything or Nothing, in case you didn’t know what EON was supposed to stand for. 

I don’t know why I got those two confused, or why I thought they were the same guy, or even that David Twohy was a British director 🇬🇧. I guess David Twohy just sounds like a British name 🇬🇧, it doesn’t sound like it would be the name of an American 🇺🇸, which is what David Twohy is. I watched that new interview he did for this 4K release 💿 done by Shout! Factory, and he definitely doesn’t have a British accent 🇬🇧. He sounded more American 🇺🇸 than anything else. He’s either American 🇺🇸 or Canadian 🇨🇦, one of those two. I guess I’ll have to find out after I finish this review, and when I actually publish it. But, even if I don’t know anything else he directed outside of the Riddick movies, or if he directed anything outside of the Riddick movies, I will say that David Twohy did a pretty good job directing this movie. I enjoyed my first full journey into the world of Riddick, and I can’t wait to see more. I have full confidence in watching the other two Riddick movies, and now knowing that he’s directing Riddick: Furya. I’m sure he’ll do a good job with that movie too. 

I did appreciate that he didn’t try to ignore The Chronicles of Riddick, even if it wasn’t as popular or well liked as the first movie, Pitch Black (2000), and this movie was largely made in response to that movie, he still acknowledged that movie, acknowledged the events of that movie. Pretty continued from where it left off, five years later, and had them play a role in the story of this film. The reason why Riddick gets stranded on this planet in the first place, this nameless planet, is that he was looking for Furya. He struck a deal with Vaako, that after he left to go find Furya, he could take his place on the throne. But, Krone botched the plan after they landed on the wrong planet and left him stranded there because he really wanted to get rid of Riddick because he didn’t like that a heretic was on the throne, and saw him as illegitimate. So, all this happens because of Krone. But, it was kind of a blessing in disguise because being away from the Necromongers, not being the Lord Marshal anymore, allowed Riddick to regain his edge, find that animal side of him again, after it had been dulled from years ruling the Necromongers as the Lord Marshal. Most movies, when they’re made in response to an unpopular entry, whether it be a prequel, sequel, or spinoff, they usually try to ignore it and pretend it doesn’t exist, only acknowledging the popular or well liked movies in the series. Like, when they made Star Wars: The Force Awakens, they went out of their way to not have to acknowledge the prequels. 

Even J. J. Abrams himself didn’t like the prequels, and wanted The Force Awakens and the other sequels to be a throwback to the original trilogy and make people forget about the prequels, and even included a line at the beginning that said that this movie would make this right. Right the wrongs the prequels had done. Until people hated the sequels even more than the prequels, and the people who grew up with the prequels had come of age, then they started acknowledging the prequels. Mainly in Disney+ shows, but still more than what the sequels had done. But, David Twohy didn’t do that here. He was more than willing to remind people of The Chronicles of Riddick, and rub their faces in it by making it such a huge part of this story, making it the reason why Riddick is on this planet to begin with. The Chronicles of Riddick ended with a cliffhanger, and he followed through with it. He addressed that part of the story that needed to be addressed for the story to progress further without any loose ends or unresolved plot threads. I doubt this story would’ve worked if they hadn’t showed what Riddick had been doing since he became the Lord Marshal, and him becoming bored with it, and not wanting this responsibility, and just wanting find his home planet after finding his true origins as a Furyan. And his edge being dulled by settling down, and in his words, becoming “civilized.” It feels more like a complete story this way. It actually makes it feel like a saga that runs across each film, every time we see Riddick on a new adventure. And we get the sense that is ultimately leading somewhere, and that somewhere of course is Furya. That is where the fourth movie is going to go. 

I wasn’t expecting them to focus so much on Riddick at the beginning. The entire first half of this movie is focused solely on Riddick, and him surviving on this planet alone, and forming a bond with this alien jackal 👽🐕, that he raises as pup after saving it from the Mud Demons, which I will get more into later. I wasn’t expecting that. I probably should’ve considering the movie’s called Riddick, of course it’s gonna focus on Riddick. But, I was expecting it to be a bit more like Pitch Black (2000) where it would focus on the other characters first, like we’re seeing mostly from their point-of-view, and then we would meet Riddick later on. But here, we start off with Riddick right off the bat. I like that, I like just cutting to the chance and getting to the character that everyone came to this movie to see, and whose name is in the title. Instead of focusing on new characters the entire time, and treating Riddick as a side character. This isn’t like the first one, where we hadn’t seen Riddick before, and he was more mysterious. Everyone who’s going to see this movie probably already knows Riddick is. They don’t need an audience surrogate to introduce him with, or get to know. No need to play up the mystery, because there really no mystery at this point with this character. This is the third movie, and this is who he is. I love how matter of fact is it with that. I will say that while watching this movie, when the opening credits started and it showed Vin Diesel’s name first before showing the title, Riddick, part of me in that moment wanted it to say “Vin Diesel is…Riddick.” I mean how cool would have been if it had said that, and it is true. Not just because Vin Diesel is playing Riddick, but also because it’s his character, you know, he owns it. Not literally but metaphorically. 

It’s one of the characters that people first think of when they think of Vin Diesel, and it’s one of the characters most associated with him. And if I’m gonna be honest, it’s the character that Vin Diesel clearly has the most fun playing. Sure, he might’ve had fun playing Dominic Toretto at first, but as the series went on, I think it became a lot less fun for him, and his performance as Dom suffered. He seems so lethargic and so over it in the later Fast & Furious movies, like the ones after Furious 7, when Paul Walker died. I think that also kind of sucked the fun out for him, that fact that Paul Walker died. That’s why he went public about contemplating using AI to bring Paul Walker back as Brian O’Connor, which I hope he doesn’t do because that would be disrespectful to both Paul Walker and to the audience, and I would lose any respect I had for Vin, and I would refuse to watch anymore of his movies after that, at least anymore of the Fast & Furious movies. And I will do it. I’ve dropped filmmakers and actors who used AI, like I refuse to watch anything Darren Aronofsky made after he recently that crappy AI generated series about the American Revolution 🇺🇸. The only one I haven’t really done that with Will Smith because maybe using AI wasn’t entirely his idea, maybe someone on his PR team or marketing team or whatever talked him into doing it. But, I feel a lot less sorry for him after he did use AI 😒. 

Luckily, it seems the eleventh (and maybe twelfth) Fast & Furious seems to be plagued by development and production issues and is stuck in development hell. All of its misfortunes were caused by the disappointing box office performance of the last Fast & Furious movie, the tenth one, Fast X. Let’s hope it stays there. And while Xander did start out as pretty different from Dom, in the first XXX, when he came back for the third one, Return of Xander Cage, they kind just wrote him as Dom but into extreme sports instead of cars. Almost indistinguishable from Dom. So, it probably felt too much like he was playing Dom, and therefore wasn’t as fun. But, because he hadn’t played Riddick in over 9 years (that’s the time it was in-between The Chronicles of Riddick and Riddick (2013)), and because he is so wildly different from Dom, or Xander, and it is first big movie role he ever played, it was still fun for him. He still had passion for this character, which he kind of lost for Dom as the Fast & Furious series went on and on. And even more time has passed in-between Riddick (2013) and the next one, Riddick: Furya, about 13 years, and the Fast & Furious series seems to have stalled and run out of steam (there’s no more fuel left in that gas tank ⛽️), so I feel like it’ll still be fun for him, and I feel like he’ll still have passion for the character and we’ll get a good performance out of him in that movie. 

There is one thing that I’ve wanted to address that I haven’t been able to since I haven’t reviewed any movies with Vin Diesel in them on my blog besides Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, and even then that was a repost from DeviantART, and even more, Vin Diesel was just voicing a character, a CG character, and he didn’t get to do any of what I’m about to talk about. But here, I finally get to review a movie with Vin Diesel in the flesh rather being the voice of a CG alien tree man 👽🌳♂︎. And one of the fun things about watching a Vin Diesel movie where it’s actually him in the flesh, and not just him providing a voice to an animated character of some kind, is getting the chance to hear his screams, grunts, and groans. Everyone talks about the noises that Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone (but more so Arnold) used to make in their movies when they were much younger, and they were big action stars, but not enough people talk about the noises that Vin Diesel makes in his movies, besides maybe that he sometimes mumbles when he talks and it’s hard to understand what he’s saying. His voice got more mumbly and growly in the later Fast & Furious sequels, probably Fast Five and beyond, which kind of leads to my theory that he kind of tired and exhausted with the role as Dom, even though he’s pretty much the main creative force behind the Fast & Furious franchise now. He’s a producer, just like is on Riddick, but like I said, Riddick’s a lot more fun for him at this point than Fast & Furious. Riddick is the real passion project while Fast & Furious is just the moneymaker 💵. It’s the thing he makes to make the money 💵 and gain clout to make the passion projects, which are the Riddick movies with David Twohy. 

But, Vin Diesel has possibly the best sounds of any major action star. Second only to Arnold really, and most of the noises people associate with Arnold were from Total Recall (1990), but he has made similar noises in other movies like Raw Deal. I would include Nicolas Cage in there, but I don’t think of Nicolas Cage as an action star, even though he has obviously done plenty of action movies. He’s far beyond just being an action star in my opinion. So, Vin Diesel has the #2 spot. His screams, grunts, and groans are amazing. We don’t hear them a lot in this movie, we mostly just hear during the fight between Riddick and Diaz towards the end of the movie, but when we do hear them, they are glorious 😁. Speaking of Diaz though, the only other actor I can think of who has better screams than Vin Diesel that isn’t named Arnold Schwarzenegger, is Dave Bautista, and he’s in this movie. He was also in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, in fact, him and Vin are all three Guardians of the Galaxy movies directed by James Gunn. But unlike Vin, Bautista doesn’t play a CG character in those movies, but rather a live action flesh blood character, and we get to hear his screams in all their glory, as well as hear him act a fool. 

Drax didn’t start out stupid in the first one, he just didn’t understand metaphors, which is apparently something his whole race doesn’t understand. I guess the implication is that they never invented the idea of metaphors or idioms on Drax’s home planet. But, as the movies went, Drax just became stupid, and that was really the only defining thing about him, he’s just a dumb meathead. By Vol. 3, he’s just a complete moron that you wonder why they even bother to keep around 🤦‍♂️. He becomes more of a liability than anything else. The more I think about it, the more I think about the way James Gunn chose to portray Drax in those movies (the way he wrote him), he really did him dirty. He didn’t give him the dignity of being a remotely serious character, or even a character that’s even capable of being serious beyond that fact that he lost his daughter and his wife and that’s why he’s like this. It’s why he was so angry 😡 in the first one and why he was so determined to kill Ronin, but it doesn’t explain why he’s so stupid. Any depth or nuance Drax had was completely sucked out of him after the first movie, and he just became the team clown 🤡, the butt of pretty much every joke. James Gunn let Rocket Raccoon 🦝 have a movie all to himself. The whole third movie is centered around him, and it completes his arc of not feeling accepted within the group, not feeling appreciated by the group, not wanting to accept the group even as his friends, and not accepting himself. But he never did the same for Drax. He never once considered doing the same thing for Drax, because Drax, in his mind, is just a comic relief character and that’s all he’s good for 😒. 

This was of course before he was in any of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. The first one wouldn’t come out until the following year, 2014, and the Guardians of the Galaxy team and the characters within were still pretty obscure, very few people had even heard of them unless they most hardcore of hardcore Marvel fans or comic book fans in general. It was still seen as a gamble for Marvel at the time to do a movie focused on a superhero team that basically no one had even heard before, and there were doubt that Marvel could even make it work or that the movie would even be a success. It was these movies that made them a household name, made them as popular as any one of the Avengers, or the Avengers team itself, and made the actors that played them huge movie stars. Particularly Chris Pratt and Dave Bautista, Zoë Saldaña, Bradley Cooper, and Vin Diesel were already established stars when the first Guardians of the Galaxy came out, it was really Pratt and Bautista that were unknowns and were untested, and made it big because of these movies specifically. 

But clearly, someone who worked on this movie, who was in charge of casting thought he had potential, and decided to put him in the movie in a supporting role. And Bautista is pretty good in the role as Diaz, even if he doesn’t get to do that much until the end of the movie when he goes rogue and tries to kill both Boss Johns and Riddick and steal the nodes for himself. I do like the line he says to Riddick when he does try to kill him, “Thanks for starting the killing spree for me, Riddick!” that was good, and this fight between him and Riddick was actually foreshadowed earlier when Diaz offers to go out there and hunt and kill Riddick himself, and Santana tells him to back off because there’s no way he could survive one-on-one with Riddick, no matter how big and strong he thinks he is, and then at the end of the movies, when shit has officially hit the fan and the Mud Demons are on the attack, and Santana’s been killed (by Riddick mind you, but still), Diaz tries to take Riddick on by himself and loses 🤷‍♂️. Santana was right. 

I watched the special features on both the Blu-Ray discs 💿 in between breaks of writing this, the one for the Unrated Director’s Cut and the one for the Theatrical Cut, because they spread them across both discs 💿. The disc 💿 for the Unrated Director’s Cut included all of the newer interviews where you see the director and two of the actors (Jordi Mollà and Katee Sackhoff) much older and talking retrospectively about the movie, while the disc 💿 for the Theatrical Cut includes all of the older archival special features, all of the behind-the-scenes featurettes that go into more detail about the making of the film. And all they talked about when it came to Dave Bautista is how big he is, not just in terms of his muscles 💪, his physique, but also his height. Jordi Mollà talked about how when Bautista was in his trailer one time, and he was walking around in there, the trailer actually shook. And I can see why. He was the only guy that they could find that could make Vin Diesel look small, and he did, during that final fight. 

My cousin actually met him in real life, and took a picture with him, and he towered over him, and I don’t think of my cousin as being a short guy ♂︎. He’s pretty tall, taller than most people on the Rez, which should tell just how short a lot of Native Americans are, especially Pueblo Natives. My cousin and I are both around 5’9” or 5’10”, but Bautista is beyond that. He has to be at least 6 foot something, 6’2” or 6’3” at the least. I have no problem with people being taller than me, I’ve kind of accepted that there are way taller people than me out there, in fact, I wouldn’t mind dating a woman ♀︎ that was taller than me. Give me a tall woman ♀︎, I’d love that 😍. Even now, even if he isn’t much a beefcake as he was back then, or even a couple of years ago, and has slimmed down significantly, he’s still imposing, he still looks pretty big and is in pretty good shape. Even Bautista slimmed down, people made it seem like he was twig now, or like he was a stick figure, or was like a cast member of the Wicked movies, but he’s not. Even with a slimmer frame, Bautista is still a big dude. 

I like Dave Bautista, I think he’s a pretty good actor. I’m not into wrestling, so I don’t know what he was like as a wrestler for the WWE, or WWF, or whatever it was called when he was on there. But I did like the promos he did his final match with Triple H, which he lost, which I guess is a time honored tradition for any wrestler who retires from the WWE, they always lose their final match, because Triple H lost his final match too, years later. But as an actor, he’s fantastic. I reviewed two of his movies on my blog before this, three actually, Army of the Dead 🎰🧟‍♂️ (which was technically a repost), The Killer’s Game, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (which was also a repost). In the case of Army of the Dead 🎰🧟‍♂️ and The Killer’s Game, they both got terrible reviews from critics 😠👎, and in case of The Killer’s Game, it bombed at the box office 💣, it was a box office failure, and I gave them both positive reviews. I gave them the most positive reviews they’ve possibly ever gotten, because I genuinely liked those movies. He had a movie that came out last year, in 2025, called Afterburn ☀️, which hardly anyone saw, and largely went ignored and forgotten, not being discussed by any major film critic, online or otherwise. He also made a cameo in the Naked Gun reboot that everyone seemed to like (everyone who saw it anyway), and people touted as a return of theatrical comedy, a comedy movie that is a pure comedy and not a blend of some of other genre like action or horror. Even though it wasn’t, it didn’t lead to some renaissance of pure comedy movies that play in the theater. It was just one movie ☝️ that people liked, that people probably weren’t expecting much from, or weren’t expecting anything good from, and actually responded to, and probably won’t be replicated again. Even if there are sequels to this specific Naked Gun movie. 

And he was in a movie that come out this year called The Wrecking Crew (2026), which is a buddy cop movie that he co-starred in with Jason Mamoa, fresh off the success of A Minecraft Movie and the critical acclaim of his Apple TV+ historical drama series, Chief of War. Which I hope to review in the future as I mentioned because it’s about Hawaiian history, and ever since getting back into Lilo & Stitch, because of the release of the live action movie last year, I’ve been interested in Hawaiian history and Native Hawaiian culture. Native Hawaiians fascinate me, as an indigenous people, even though Hawaiians are considered Pacific Islanders and Pacific Islanders and indigenous people are considered two separate things. I’ve even been considering writing a story that features Native Hawaiian characters, and maybe even takes place in Hawai‘i. Him and Mamoa play brothers in the movie, with Bautista being more of the straight laced brother and Mamoa being the crazy loose cannon (he’s kind of viewed as the fuck-up), and in buddy cop fashion, they annoy the fuck out of each other while trying to stop a criminal of some kind. Hopefully the action and their banter is enough to provide entertainment in the movie. It’s a streaming movie that’s exclusive to Amazon Prime, and hardly anyone talked about it when it came out. The only critics that actually covered this movie were the guys at Double Toasted 🍞, and they made only it a Members Only video, meaning that you cannot watch it unless you’re a channel member.
 
I plan on reviewing both movies at some point, Afterburn ☀️ (2025) and The Wrecking Crew (2026), if they’re both still available by the time I’m in the mood to review them 😒. In the age of streaming, you never know if the movie you want to watch will still be there or not by the time you do actually want to watch it. That’s why I wanted to check to see for sure if The Simpsons Movie was still available on Disney+, because even though The Simpsons is fully owned by Disney, and Disney is still willing to keep The Simpsons around to have a return on their investment for buying 20th Century Fox, and all the properties under it, for several billions of dollars 💵, you never know. Maybe, Disney decides to disown The Simpsons Movie because it wasn’t under them, it was made under 20th Century Fox when it was still an independent company (not really since it was owned by the News Corporation by Rupert Murdoch, but you know what I mean), and it took a not so subtle jab at them. There’s a scene where Bart puts a bra that he found on the train 🚊 that they were taking to get back to Springfield to stop the EPA from destroying it on his head, and then does an impression of Mickey Mouse saying “I’m the mascot of an evil corporation.” Do you think Disney would tolerate that? I guess they just swallow their pride, and take it in order to get all those sweet Simpsons dollars 💵 🤑. 

There are a few other actors of note that I want to get into this review before I talk about the Mud Demons and then talk more about the upcoming fourth one, so I’m just going list them off. Starting with Jordi Mollà, who is a Spanish actor 🇪🇸 who you may not recognize by name, especially if you’re American 🇺🇸 like me, but you may recognize by his face and his voice. If you don’t recognize him, he’s the guy ♂︎ that played Johnny Tapia, the main villain in Bad Boys II, if you’ve seen that movie. That’s the only I knew him from prior to watching this movie, in fact, when I saw a clip from this movie, from the scene where Riddick kills him with his own knife (this blade that kind of looks like a machete almost), I first thought was, “Oh hey look, it’s the guy that played Johnny Tapia in Bad Boys II.” And in the comment section of that clip on YouTube, there were people making jokes about how Groot, Drax, and Johnny Tapia all were all in the same scene together, since you know, Vin Diesel also voiced Groot in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, and Dave Bautista is most famous for playing Drax also in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. In fact, I sort of like to think that these movies take place in the same universe as the Bad Boys movies, and that Santana is a descendant of Johnny Tapia. It’s kind of a fun idea 😆. Of course, this was pre-Guardians of the Galaxy Dave Bautista, but it’s still the role most people think of when they think of Dave Bautista. They sure don’t think of Scott Ward from Army of the Dead 🎰🧟‍♂️, even though I do because I really liked him as that character. That movie may have flaws, it maybe a really stupid movie, but Dave Bautista isn’t one of the things that was wrong with it. And he is once again playing a villain in this movie. Jordi Mollà I mean, not Dave Bautista, though Bautista also plays a villain this movie. 

I saw the newer interview that he did with Ballyhoo Motion Pictures—the same company that did Total Excess: How Carolco Changed Hollywood, the documentary about Carolco Pictures that was included on the special features of the 4K release 💿 of Total Recall (1990) (hence why the title of the documentary was Total Excess and why they use music from Total Recall (1990) throughout that documentary)—for the 4K steelbook release 💿 by Shout! Factory, and in it he said that he based the character of Santana on Han Solo, that Santana was kind of like the Han Solo of this movie. Yeah, if he was more rapey 😒. I just didn’t see it, I didn’t see the comparison or similarity between Santana and Han Solo. Santana’s too much of a pervy creep to be like Han Solo. As much roguish and rugged as he was, Han was still a hero, he was still righteous. He had a heart ❤️, and in the end, always did the right thing. I mean, why do you think he went back to help Luke, Leia, C-3PO, R2D2, and the Rebellion take down the Death Star when his job was technically and had no real interest in staying? It’s because he felt guilty about not helping the cause, and letting the Empire destroy more innocent planets like Leia’s world, Alderaan, and wanted to be on the right side of history. He wanted to be the hero, and he was. 

Santana on the other hand, is evil, like fully evil. No question about it. There’s not a single redeeming quality about Santana as a person, he is as worse as they come. I mean, he literally had a sex slave, who he then shot and killed as soon as had Luna cut her loose after they landed on the planet, to “make space” or “lighten the ship” 🙄. That’s why he dies, and doesn’t make it to the end of the movie along with everyone else, because he’s a bad guy. He’s the closest thing this movie has to a main human villain, besides Diaz, but I consider him to be more a secondary villain. He only goes fully rogue and tries to kill Riddick and Boss John’s after Santana dies, and his crew no longer has a team, and the chain of command is all screwed up by the arrival of the Mud Demons. He had to go. That, and he also killed Riddick’s alien jackal friend 👽🐕 that he raised as a pup, and if you kill an animal in a movie, even an alien jackal 👽🐕, then you’re definitely going to die, and they’re going to make sure you die horribly. Especially in the animal in question is portrayed sympathetically, and you’re supposed to care about it and root for it, or, in the case of this movie, if the animal is a companion of the main character, or one of the main characters. And Santana does get it pretty good in this movie, his death is probably the best kill in the entire movie. Getting his head chopped off by Riddick while he was still chained up ⛓️ (Riddick kicked the blade into him, that’s how he did it), and his severed head landed in the very same box he was going to put Riddick’s head into if he had managed to kill him, it’s great. Nice bit of poetic justice there. 

Both times this actor played a villain in an American movies 🇺🇸, he got pretty awesome deaths because his death in Bad Boys II was also pretty cool. He got shot in the head by Marcus, and then landed on a mine, and then the top half of his body blew up 💥, getting all kinds of bloody 🩸 and gory chunks on Mike’s back. Way better than Fouche’s death in the first movie, which was just him getting shot multiple times. BTW, Bad Boys II is still to this day my favorite film in the Bad Boys series, and part of that is due to the performance that Jordi Mollà gave as Johnny Tapia as well as the performance that Peter Stormare gave as the Russian club owner and drug dealer 🇷🇺 that Johnny Tapia double crosses. That was Peter Stormare’s second collaboration with Michael Bay after Armageddon ☄️. I do on reviewing it some time in the future, along with the first Bad Boys, since I never wrote a full review for either of them, nor have I ever written a full review of the third film, Bad Boys for Life. The only Bad Boys movie that I’ve written a review for is the fourth film, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, which you read on the blog right now if you want. After you finish reading this review, you can go read that one. I’ll leave a link to it here that you can click on. 

I was surprised at how much of a main character that Santana was. Like Jordi literally has second billing in the credits, at least on Wikipedia, after Vin Diesel. I thought he would be more a supporting player in this, where he wouldn’t have that many lines, maybe just in the background most of the time, and is just there to piss Riddick off and get killed by him. And that while is true, he is there to just be an asshole, and piss everybody off 😡, especially Dahl and Riddick, but he had a lot more screen time and lines that I thought he would initially going into it. Like, him and his crew are the first people we see after the focus shifts away from Riddick more towards the mercenaries that he lured over here to this planet. Boss Johns and Dahl, and their crew don’t appear until much later. And even in the special features, Jordi is treated as a main cast member, as one of the main people. You know he got a new interview on the Unrated Director’s Cut disc 💿, while Matt Nable, the actor who played Boss Johns didn’t. 

Only three new interviews, one for David Twohy, one for Katee Sackhoff, and one for Jordi Mollà. But not Vin Diesel, or Matt Nable, or Dave Bautista, or anyone else. Vin Diesel and Dave Bautista make sense why they couldn’t get them because they’re two most expensive actors in the cast, and they’re always busy. But come on, not even Bokeem Woodbine? Who was one of the rogue Marines that occupies Alcatraz, takes all the tourists and staff hostage, and threatens to launch VX gas rockets at San Francisco unless the US government 🇺🇸 pays a ransom in The Rock (1996), and is in a bunch of other movies, a lot of which many of you have probably seen at least once. Usually as a supporting player, rarely if ever the main lead. It is funny to talk about Santana because there’s the real-life band or artist named Santana, and my grandma is a really fan of them, or him. I can’t write his name and write about him without thinking of the band or music artist, Santana. I like some of Santana’s songs, my grandma has pretty good taste in music. 

Speaking of characters I can’t write about without thinking of something from my personal life, Dahl, played by Katee Sackhoff. Yes, when I was watching this movie, and found out that this character’s name was Dahl, I couldn’t help but think of my one of my older sister (the second oldest) because even though my sister’s name isn’t actually Dahl, I used to call her Dahl when we were growing up. I never called her by her actual first name, I just kept calling her Dahl. I don’t call her Dahl anymore, as an adult, now I just call her by her real first name, which is a Russian name 🇷🇺 even she’s not Russian 🇷🇺 and doesn’t have a drop of Russian blood 🇷🇺🩸 in her (our mom just named her that because she wanted us to have unique names, that’s why my name is Jediah, a Hebrew name, even though none of us are Jewish ✡️) which is all I’ll say without giving anything away for privacy reasons, it’s been years since I’ve actually called her Dahl. My dad still calls her Dahl because he thinks that I still call her Dahl even though I don’t. Maybe I should start calling her Dahl again, maybe next time I see her, I’ll call her Dahl. I think that would really make her happy, just like old times, but I wouldn’t be doing it for her, I’d doing it for me because it makes me feel good to call her Dahl again. 

BTW I did the same thing with my oldest sister. She also has a Russian name 🇷🇺, kind of, it’s not necessarily a Russian name 🇷🇺 per se but it’s a name closely associated with a Russian historical figure 🇷🇺. I mentioned this when I talked Anastasia (1997), I was writing the foreword for my post about the movie, Anna (2019), and I went on this tangent about Anastasia (1997) and Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia 🇷🇺, because I was talking about how my sister’s name was also Anastasia, and how she would get comments about it from people she knew because of that movie, and how she would get upset when people pronounced her name like how Anastasia is pronounced in the movie, when it’s actually pronounced more like Anna’s name in Anna (2019). But, I never used to call her Anastasia, and I still don’t, instead I called her by a different name. A name that I don’t know how to spell, but people in my family who know me pretty well and know what I called each of my sisters will know what I’m talking about. She had two nicknames or alternate names I guess (since they weren’t really nicknames or middle names), and the second one, Marche (pronounced Mar-Shay) is what I call her by more nowadays. I feel embarrassed calling her by the other name because it sounds too much like something a kid who doesn’t know better would say. Plus, I don’t even know how to spell it, so that kind of removes its viability as a name that I can call her. I guess I can give it a try, to see how it feels coming out of my mouth again, and what she thinks of me calling her that again. But again, I wouldn’t be doing it for her, I’d be doing for me because it makes me good, it makes me full comfortable, not her. 

I try not to do anything specifically to please my sisters. I’ve got nothing to prove, I don’t have to prove anything to them, and they’re not even a huge part of my life anymore. We don’t live together anymore, we all live in separate places now, though they both live in Albuquerque, just in different parts. Though I won’t say, both because I don’t know (I don’t where the second oldest sister, Dahl lives but I know the first oldest, Marche lives), and also for privacy reasons. They barely keep in contact with me anyway. They almost never call or text me, just every once in a while, and they always insist that I be the one to call or text them, that I be the one to initiate. If you want to talk to me, if you want to call or text me, then just do it, don’t just wait for me to call or text you, otherwise you’ll never get anything done. That’s how I feel about it. Besides, they can’t call or text me now anyway because our phones 📱 are currently off. Unless they have iPhones 📱 like me, I can’t text them or call them. Calling doesn’t work regardless, but texting does work if you both have iPhones 📱. So, why do I have to go out of my way to please them, you know what I’m saying? 

Given that this character shares the same name as one that I used to call my sister, it is going to be awkward to talk about the character Dahl, and a certain aspect of the character that is kept somewhat ambiguous and up to the viewer’s interpretation. You’ll see what I mean in a moment. But, Dahl is a pretty great character, I liked her a lot. I really do like Katee Sackhoff. It’s not everyday you find a woman ♀︎, actress or not, who’s into science fiction. Most women ♀︎ if they’re into any genre at all are usually into either fantasy, or horror, or romance ❤️ (and by extension, romantic comedy ❤️), which is probably the most stereotypical genre for women ♀︎ to like, romance ❤️. Never action or science fiction. So, when you meet a woman ♀︎ who is into action or science fiction, or both, without you having to get her into it first, you gotta cherish it. Really take it and appreciate it while you have it. And Katee Sackhoff was into both. She said in one of the interviews she did for one of the archival special features on the Blu-Ray disc 💿 for the Theatrical Cut, that she watched Predator a pretty young age, and I too watched Predator at a pretty young age. She talked about how she grew up around a lot of guys ♂︎, and “guy stuff ♂︎,” and was kind of like a tomboy in that way. Though, she did embrace more of her feminine side as she became an adult, but she still has a masculine side to her that she keeps close to the chest, and will sometimes wear as a defense mechanism, as well as to blend it and hang with out with men ♂︎, or relate to men ♂︎. This is all stuff Katee Sackhoff talked about in the interviews she did in regards to this movie, both the newer one and the archival ones. 

She also talked about how she came from the world of low budget science fiction, particularly low budget science fiction on television, that’s how she made a name for herself. And this movie was no exception because this was a lower budgeted movie, certainly low budget compared to the second movie, only she got to co-star with a pretty big movie star, Vin Diesel, who was known around the world at this point, most from the Fast & Furious movies. She’s definitely good at playing badass chicks ♀︎ who can kick the ass of any man ♂︎ on screen, and you can believe can hold her own in a group of mostly men, which she is in this film. She’s the only woman ♀︎ on screen for most of the movie. Sure we have those concubines, including the one assassin who poses as a concubine to get close to Riddick to try and kill him, in the Necromonger scenes. Both those scenes are only at the beginning and end of the movie. They bookend the movie. But, for the 70% or 80% of the movie, it’s just Katee Sackhoff as Dahl. Once she and Boss Johns’s group show, she’s the only woman we see from then on until get the second and final Necromonger scene at the very end of the movie. And like I said before, I do think that Katee Sackhoff would’ve been a good pick to play Samus Aran in Metroid if they made a live action Metroid movie in the past two decades, like in the 2000s or 2010s. 

As for the character herself, Dahl pretty much fills a similar role that Radha Mitchell’s character, Carolyn Fry did in Pitch Black (2000), where she’s the only woman ♀︎ in the group, or one of the few women ♀︎ on the group, she’s blonde 👱‍♀️, and she’s the one that vibes the most with Riddick out of any of the other characters. It’s funny that the two female characters ♀︎ that Riddick falls for or fall for Riddick are both happen to be blonde 👱‍♀️. I know there was a third female character ♀︎ that developed feeling for Riddick 🥰, or Riddick developed feeling for 🥰, in The Chronicles of Riddick named Kyra, who was not a blonde white woman 👩🏼, but a black woman 👩🏾. But, she died by the end of that movie, and that death left some impression on Riddick. The plot summary on Wikipedia wouldn’t have started with “Five years after Kyra’s death…” if it wasn’t a big deal. And while Carolyn also died, Pitch Black (2000) and Riddick (2013) are the two entries in the franchise so far that are the most similar to each other, so I’m only counting those for now to make this point about Riddick liking blondes 👱‍♀️, or blondes 👱‍♀️ liking him. Sorry, Kyra. I haven’t seen Pitch Black (2000) obviously, I’ve made that abundantly clear already, so I don’t know how close of a relationship Carolyn developed with Riddick, if the movie ever implied that they were love interests ❤️ in any way, but she definitely became a close friend and ally of Riddick’s, even if, from what I understand, she doesn’t make it out by the end. Much to the chagrin of Riddick, and some of the other surviving characters in that movie. 

I also don’t know if Carolyn for sure was the only woman ♀︎ in the movie, or if there other women ♀︎ in the movie as well, that got stranded on that planet as well, but she was the main female character ♀︎ of that movie. She was the one that got the most amount of focus besides Riddick himself, and she’s the one we’re supposed to root for besides Riddick. And of course, we’re supposed to feel sorry when she dies. But here, Dahl is the only woman. She’s the only woman in either group of mercenaries that ends up on this planet, hunting for Riddick, and they do strongly imply that she develops feelings for Riddick 🥰, and the two become love interests ❤️. Katee Sackhoff said in the newer interview she did for the 4K release 💿 by Shout! Factory that she thought of Dahl as being a love interest ❤️ for Riddick, that she definitely developed some kind of feelings for him because they were kindred spirits (there’s just something about him that she was drawn to), he was the only one who she was willing to let her guard down for, and that she likes to think they hooked up at end of the movie. But, given that we don’t see her on the same ship that Riddick is taking to fly over to Furya, I guess she decided not to go with him and to stay with her own group. Maybe she was just a one night stand to him, who knows 🤷‍♂️? 

Which brings me to the thing I really to focus on when it comes to character of Dahl, and the thing that’ll make things really awkward 😬 for me to write about a character that shares a name with one of my two older sisters, what is Dahl’s sexuality? What is her sexual orientation? If you go by the line she says to Santana when she punches him 👊 for the second time as she calls her Boss Johns’s personal whore, “I don’t fuck guys ♂︎, but I can fuck them up if they need to,” if took that line at face value, you’d probably assume that she was a lesbian ⚢. Santana certainly thinks so, since he calls her a dyke later on in the movie, and I know a lot of people online will probably think she’s a lesbian ⚢ too. And those same people probably scoffed at the ending 😒, where Dahl develops feelings for Riddick 🥰, and the two sort of hook up at the end, especially if they really wanted her to be a lesbian ⚢, seeing as another movie where the lesbian ⚢ gets “turned straight” by a guy ♂︎, and that being presented as a good thing because it conforms to heteronormativity. 

It makes straight people ⚤ feel comfortable, but seeing a lesbian ⚢ on screen, and instead seeing a straight woman ⚤♀︎ who was lead astray, and then was saved and found her way again after a man ♂︎ “set her straight” (no pun intended). But Katee Sackhoff doesn’t personally see Dahl as a lesbian. She explained it in the interview as Dahl just bullshitting. It’s just something she said to get Santana off her back, and to get him to stop perving on her, and it’s something she says to other guys ♂︎ to get them off her back and not constantly lust after her and perv on her. It’s a defense mechanism basically. But we, as the audience, don’t know for sure if she’s a lesbian ⚢ or not. She keeps that aspect of herself very close to the chest, a closely guarded secret, not letting anyone know what her sexual orientation is unless she absolutely trusts them, like say Boss Johns, or Riddick 😉. But, given the fact that she develops feelings for Riddick, and it’s strongly implied that they hook at the end to some degree, even in just a one night stand type of arrangement, I think it’s pretty safe to assume that she’s not a lesbian ⚢. If she’s not straight ⚤, then she’s at the very least, bisexual. 

A lot of people tend to forget that bisexuality is even a thing, or that it’s an option when trying to come up with sexual orientations for all your characters when writing, if that’s something you want to get into in your story. If they don’t forget, they just ignore and pretend it doesn’t exist. There’s a lot of biphobia out there, not just amongst straight people, but also amongst the LGBTQ+ community 🏳️‍🌈. There are some people within the LGBTQ+ community 🏳️‍🌈 that feel that bisexual people are not “gay enough” or “queer enough” due to their ability to enter heterosexual relationships ⚤ (bisexual men ♂︎ can date women ♀︎ and bisexual women ♀︎ can date men ♂︎), and they hate any type of heteronormativity, even if that’s what makes the person happy 😊. Who cares if it’s heteronormative, or looks heteronormative? Some within the LGBTQ+ community 🏳️‍🌈 even question bisexuality’s validity as a sexual orientation. But, biphobia amongst straight people ⚤ is a lot more straight forward (no pun intended) and a lot less hypocritical. It mostly comes from people misunderstanding bisexuality and bisexual people, and assuming the worst about them. Like, that bisexual people are more adulterous and more likely to cheat, or that they’re all polyamorous and want to enter open relationships, so they can have sex with people of the other gender they’re into. Neither of which is true. 

Being bisexual doesn’t make you anymore adulterous than a straight person ⚤, or a gay ⚣ or lesbian person ⚢, and it doesn’t mean that you want an open relationship. Most bisexual people out there are pretty monogamous actually. They want one partner ☝️, and want to stick with that partner as long as possible, so long as nothing goes wrong, and their partner doesn’t cheat on them or die. They’re just like any other person, except they can feel attraction to someone who’s the same gender as them, and they can date someone who’s the same gender as them if they’re available and on the dating market. Biphobic straight people also tend to think that bisexuality isn’t real, and bisexual people are just people in denial. Meaning they think bisexual men ♂︎ are just gay men ⚣, and bisexual women ♀︎ are just straight women ♀︎. Just like biphobic people in the LGBTQ+ community 🏳️‍🌈 do actually. Biphobia is largely the same whether it’s coming from a straight person ⚤ or a queer person. 

Except biphobic queer people will add all these other things as to why they don’t like bisexual people and don’t think bisexuality is real, but that is what ultimately boils down. It’s people denying the existence of bisexuality and bisexual people, and telling bisexual people that they’re wrong for identifying as bisexual. That’s not even getting into pansexuality. Pansexuality is a lot like bisexual, except that it’s more open, it’s open to every gender, not just men and women. Pansexuals aren’t just merely attracted to men ♂︎ and women ♀︎ like bisexuals are, they’re attracted to trans people 🏳️‍⚧️, as well as people who have other gender identities that don’t conform to the men/women binary ♂︎♀︎. If you think people forget bisexuality is a thing, especially Hollywood writers, then they you bet they forget pansexuality is a thing, and a lot less people understand pansexuality than they do bisexuality. And the worst assumptions that are made about bisexual people are made about pansexual people tenfold. 

I guess it’s kind of like how Riddick bullshitted about his past in Pitch Black (2000), back when he didn’t know anything about his past, before the Necromongers told him that he was Furyan, and he just made up a backstory for himself that he told to the other characters that were marooned on that planet with him. Maybe that’s why Riddick and Dahl were drawn to each other, and why they had kindred spirits, they both lied about a personal aspect of their lives. Riddick lied about his past, and Dahl lied about her sexuality. Only the reasons why they lied are different, Riddick lied because he didn’t know anything about his past, and Dahl lied because she didn’t want Santana and other guys ♂︎ like him to creep on her. And now I think about it, Riddick lying about his past out of ignorance is sort of similar to how Faye Valentine lied about her past when she first met Spike Spiegel and Jet Black in Cowboy Bebop (1998). She told them that she was a Romani, when she actually wasn’t. She was actually a rich girl 🤑♀︎ who got cryogenically frozen 🥶 for some length of time after Astral Gate accident that left Earth 🌎 with uninhabitable for humans, and then got woken up and then got scammed by some shady guy ♂︎ who gave her all of his debt 💸, making her broke. She went from being a rich girl 🤑 to being a broke girl ♀︎, always looking for money 💵, whether it’s through bounty hunting or gambling. Cowboy Bebop (1998) came out 2 years before Pitch Black (2000), so it’s always possible the writers, Jim and John Wheat took inspiration for that when it came to writing a mysterious character who lies about their past because they don’t actually know it. 

And yes, Jim and John Wheat are the credited writers of Pitch Black (2000), and they are the credited creators of the Richard B. Riddick character and other characters within the Riddick universe. So, even though the franchise is most associated with Vin Diesel and David Twohy, Jim and John Wheat are the actual creators. Kind of like how Jim and John Thomas are the creators of the Predator character and the Predator franchise. It’s funny how the creators of Riddick and the creators of Predator are brothers who have the same exact first names. But, David Twohy is the sole writer on this film 👇, he wrote and directed it. While Vin Diesel produced it along with Ted Field. I’d personally like to think that Dahl is bisexual. Like, if you don’t like the idea that she’s actually straight ⚤, then just go with that. She can be queer, but still have an attraction to Riddick 😍. That way she’s only partially lying. Yeah, she fucks women ♀︎, but she does also fuck guys ♂︎ too on occasion if they appeal to her 😏. You know? It makes sense to me. That’s my personal headcanon. Take it or leave it. 

At least we got to see Katee Sackhoff titty in this, that was pretty nice, and then we got those Necromonger concubines naked too at the beginning. Even Riddick’s naked in one scene, though he’s covered in silhouette and you don’t actually see anything, but you can totally tell he’s naked in those shadows. This movie had a lot more nudity than I thought it would. I wasn’t expecting it to have nudity at all. Obviously it’s an Unrated cut of an already R rated movie, except some R rated or Unrated stuff, but still. Some R rated movies don’t have any nudity at all, a lot of actually, you’d be surprised. But, this movie not has Katee Sackhoff topless in one scene, but women ♀︎ just full frontal naked at the beginning. Women ♀︎ that are Riddick’s concubines because he was the Lord Marshal, and the Lord Marshal gets to have a harem I guess. That’s one of the perks. 

Last but not least, we have Karl Urban, who reprises his role as Commander Siberius Vaako from The Chronicles of Riddick, in a minor but pivotal role. He’s the reason why all this happens. If it wasn’t for his desire to become Lord Marshal himself, and if it wasn’t for the deal that he made with Riddick for him to give up the Lord Marshalship so that he can take his place in exchange for showing him the way to Furya, Riddick would’ve never got stranded on this planet and none of the events of the film would’ve happened. Sure, it’s Krone that betrayed Riddick, and left him to die on this planet, but it was still Vaako who set these events in motion by making a deal with Riddick to give up the Lord Marshalship and left him take his place. Vaako is a bit of a fan favorite character from what I understand, and what little we see of him in this movie, I did like him. He seems like a cool character. I can’t wait to see more of him in The Chronicles of Riddick, when I finally get to that movie. It’s always a treat to see Karl Urban in anything, even if he’s not playing the main lead. He’s a pretty good actor, and a pretty cool actor at that. I don’t why I had any doubts about him playing Johnny Cage in Mortal Kombat II 🐉 (2026). After seeing that first trailer, I have full confidence that he can pull it off. He might well end up being the best thing about that movie. Just like Hiroyuki Sanada and Joe Taslim were the best parts of the first movie, Mortal Kombat 🐉 (2021). He can make a movie ten times better by just appearing for a few minutes, which he does in this movie. We only see him once at the beginning, and then we only hear his voice after he achieved whatever kind of transcendence he achieved by the end of the movie. The final shot of the movie is just Riddick looking at a black hole, or something that looks like a black hole, and I feel the movie’s implying that either Vaako’s inside of that black hole or he is the black hole.

That reminds me, beyond these opening and closing scenes, why aren’t the Necromongers mentioned anywhere else? Like why didn’t Riddick ask them if they were Necromongers, or if they were working for the Necromongers, and why don’t any of the mercenaries ever mention that Riddick was the Lord Marshal, and why don’t they ask him about it when they got him chained up ⛓️ and they’re interrogating him? Or rather, Johns is interrogating him since he’s the one that wants answers. Like, why did any of them say, “Hey, I thought you were the Lord Marshal of the Necromongers, what happened to you?” and then Riddick says something like, “I was, until they betrayed him and left me for dead on this planet” and then he maybe he could tell them about the deal he made with Vaako, or at least, just tell them that he’s looking for his home planet. As much as I like the Necromonger stuff we did in this movie, I would’ve liked it a bit more, at least, a bit more mentions of the Necromongers, just to really tie this all together, and make it seem like this is all happening in the same universe. That way it feels more like one continuous story, one continuous saga. Because it is, they don’t feel that connected. These elements don’t quite together to where they feel like they’re in the same universe, and if there was a bit more acknowledgment of the other, then it would really tie it all together. Then it would feel more like a cohesive universe. The fact that Necromonger stuff doesn’t factor into the main plot beyond just the opening and closing scene, did make me wonder how much of it was in the Theatrical Cut. 

I was under the impression that the entire first half of the movie focusing on Riddick getting bored 🥱 being the Lord Marshal, getting stranded on this planet, and then surviving on this planet while also raising one of these alien jackal pups 👽🐕 as his own, making it his pet and his companion in this hostile world was not in the Theatrical Cut at all, and the movie actually started when the mercenaries arrived on the planet. Because the movie goes from focusing solely on Riddick to focusing mostly on the mercenaries with Riddick lurking in the shadows, waiting to whittle them down. It felt like stuff that was added in the Unrated version because then they didn’t have to worry about keeping the movie under 2 hours. The Theatrical Cut clocks in at 119 minutes, which is just barely under 2 hours. One more minute, and then it would’ve been a full 2 hours. I don’t know how much longer the Unrated Director’s Cut is compared to the Theatrical Cut, or what scenes were added in that weren’t in the Theatrical Cut, because I only saw the Unrated version. I never saw the Theatrical version, partly because I never saw this in theaters. But, I guess most of that stuff at the beginning is also in the Theatrical Cut as well. It is kind of a weird way to structure the movie though to go from focusing entirely on Riddick to focusing on these new characters who we’ve seen before, and a lot of whom end up dying. The whole vibe of the movie changes once those mercenaries arrive. 

I guess while I am talking about stuff I didn’t really like, or I thought was weird, or is perhaps a bit nitpicky, the CGI isn’t very good 😒. I mean, it looks fine in some parts, but a lot of times that CGI looks awful. And I’m not a CGI hater by any means, I’m actually a huge CGI defender if you’ve read some of my other posts. You could tell they had a lower budget on this film, and couldn’t make the CGI look as good as they could if they had a bigger budget. This one aspect where having a lower budget was a major disadvantage, the quality of the visual effects took a nose dive. The green screen work is also pretty bad in some parts, it’s very noticeable sometimes that they shot this on a green screen. I will say that the CGI on the creatures does look good for the most part, like the CGI on the jackals 🐕 and the Mud Demons, and some of the other creatures that are on this planet looks decent. It’s everything else where the CGI kind of falls apart. But, Pitch Black (2000) looks like it also had some pretty bad CGI, and that was on the creatures, while this movie nails the creatures in terms of the quality of the CGI on them for the most part, so I’ll let that slide. These are two movies, Pitch Black (2000) and Riddick (2013), that would’ve benefited from using a lot more practical effects than they ended up using, but again, I want to make it clear that I’m not against CGI. In most cases, I’m fine with CGI, and I’m even in favor of it sometimes, and I definitely prefer to AI, which has no human artist involved (it completely lacks a human touch that traditional CGI has), but bad CGI is bad CGI, what can I say? Just because I like CGI doesn’t that I can’t tell when CGI looks bad, or that I have to defend all CGI effects. Some CGI is just poorly done, and unfortunately in this film, and in Pitch Black (2000), it’s kind of poorly done 😬. 

One last thing I want to cover before I finally start wrapping this is the creatures. The creatures in this movie look pretty cool. Not only are they beautifully designed, but the CGI on them is pretty well done 👍. If the CGI had to be bad everywhere else, I’m glad they put all their effort into the creatures. Obviously the main star of the show is the Mud Demons, which are the main threat in the movie. The things that are trying to kill the human characters in the last third of the movie. They’re called Mud Demons because not only are they the most monstrous things on the planet, but they spend the majority of their time lying dormant under the dirt until the next rainy season 🌧️ starts. Then they rise up from the mud, and begin their killing spree. I do like how they established that ticking time bomb pretty early on. At first, we’re not sure why Riddick and the jackal 🐕 are so worried about the oncoming rain storm 🌧️, and why Riddick himself is so determined to get off of that planet before the storm approaches 🌧️, but given that it’s Riddick, we know it’s something bad. “It ain’t him you got to worry about.” And then, when the rain 🌧️ does it, and the Mud Demons rise up from the resulting mud, we understand why Riddick was so worried, because they immediately start causing havoc. 

I guess it’s kind of the suns ☀️ going down, and the darkness coming in Pitch Black (2000), the creatures in that movie only came out at night, and when nighttime approaches, you better watch out, and make you got someone who has built-in night vision and can see in the dark like Riddick. But, in the case of the Mud Demons themselves, they look pretty cool. They don’t look like anything on Earth 🌎, which is what I like in alien creatures 👽, I don’t like it when alien creatures 👽 look too much like Earth animals 🌎. I’m the kind of person where it if doesn’t look like something out Wayne Barlow’s Expedition, then I won’t accept it as an alien creature 👽, an alien animal 👽 that could possibly exist. But these things don’t like Earth animals 🌎, not even close, and I really appreciate that. They have little bit reptilian in them, as well as little bit of fish in them, and of course a little scorpion 🦂 because they got those long stringer tails which they use to kill their prey. But their tails don’t look exactly like scorpions’ tails 🦂, but they do serve the same function as a scorpion 🦂’s tail, it’s their main weapon of attack and defense. 

The Mud Demons actually remind me of the Skullcrawlers from the MonsterVerse a little bit because they’re vaguely reptile looking things (although neither one is a reptile), have two legs, they mostly stay dormant underground, or under the dirt in the case of the Mud Demons, and they crawl around just like the Skullcrawlers do; hence why they were called Skullcrawlers. The only difference is that the Mud Demons are aliens 👽, and they’re much smaller, and they have that long stinger tail. An interesting note of which is that the baby Mud Demons are worse, you don’t get stung by one of the babies because they hold the most venom. It was a baby that stung that jackal pup 🐕 that Riddick saves, and it’s a baby that stings and kills Vargas. It’s funny, there’s a character in Bad Boys II that’s also named Vargas. Another reason to believe they might be the same universe 👀 😆. 

I said earlier that neither the Mud Demons nor the Skullcrawlers were reptiles, and I feel that needs a bit more explaining, more so for the Skullcrawlers than the Mud Demons. You see, despite them looking very reptilian, the Skullcrawlers are not actually reptiles. They’re a type of amphibian. I only know this because I saw a video on YouTube where a guy ♂︎ tried to design a more “realistic” Skullcrawler, and he said that the canonical Skullcrawlers in the movies and other MonsterVerse related media are amphibians rather than reptiles like most people assume by looking at them. He only brought up to say that he wouldn’t be making his Skullcrawler an amphibian, and that he would make his a reptile, a type of monitor lizard to be more precise. But, I was surprised to hear that, like, “Wow, okay,” so we did some mainstream amphibian kaiju, it’s just that they look nothing like amphibians, or what we usually think of when we think of amphibians. But whatever, I’ll take it. We need more amphibian kaiju, and just killer amphibians in creature features. I wrote in one of my notes for one of my future reviews (of a creature feature obviously) that I think someone should make a creature feature about a Temnospondyl, which are an extinct order of amphibians that existed from the Carboniferous to the Early Cretaceous, but were the most dominant from the Carboniferous to the Triassic. One of which featured in the 2000 Disney movie, Dinosaur, the Koolasuchus. 

They’re such cool animals, and I’m surprised no one’s made more movies about them. Which is something you can say about a lot of prehistoric animals that aren’t dinosaurs or the typical ice age animals 🧊 like mammoths 🦣 or sabertooth cats, actually 🫤. Even amongst dinosaurs, the only ones we usually see are Tyrannosaurus rex, or Triceratops, or Stegosaurus, or one of the long-neck dinosaurs 🦕 like Brachiosaurus, Brontosaurus (which is now a valid genus, or it became a valid genus a decade or so ago), and Apatosaurus, or some type of dromeosaurid, usually a Velociraptor because of Jurassic Park. Or pterosaurs like Pterodactyl or Pteranodon or even Quetzalcoatlus (the largest known pterosaur and the largest known flying animal), which aren’t actually dinosaurs, but a lot of think they are, so they’re usually included. Occasionally you might get an Allosaurus, or Carnotaurus, or Giganotosaurus, or a Spinosaurus, or Baryonyx, or Parasaurolophus, or Ankylosaurus, but mostly, it’s just those five, plus a pterosaur of some kind, which as I stated, were not dinosaurs, but were their own order of flying reptiles completely separate from dinosaurs. But most people think pterosaurs were dinosaurs, so what can you do 🤷‍♂️? 

We do actually get a glimpse of the Mud Demons before they go on the attack later in the movie, once the rain 🌧️ hits. They’re one of the obstacles that Riddick has to get past to get the tundra part of the planet. We have this whole montage of him creating anti-venom so that he’ll be immune to the Mud Demons’ sting when he goes to confront them, as well as cure the jackal pup 🐕 he just saved. Then we see him kill one, and then gut another one, which doesn’t actually kill it, it’s still alive after having its belly slashed open and its guts spilled out. In fact, we even see it eat its own guts 🤢. So, it is kind of weird that movie treats it as a surprise when the Mud Demons do show up towards the end of the movie, when they start rising from the mud and attacking the outpost, as if we’ve never seen them before. We already seen them before in all their glory, in the first half of the movie. Sure, we didn’t see them in the huge numbers that we did, but we still saw them. And sure, it’s the mercenaries’ first time seeing them, but it’s not our first time seeing them, we the audience. This is another reason why I questioned whether that whole first half focused solely on Riddick was even in the Theatrical Cut or not. But, not just the Mud Demons of course, there are other creatures on this planet too. It’s an entire alien ecosystem 👽. Obviously I keep talking about the alien jackals 👽🐕, which are the second most prominent creatures that we see on this planet interacting with our main characters. 

They’re one of the first things we see when Riddick lands on that planet, after Krone leaves him there for dead, besides the alien vultures 👽. I know I said that I don’t like it when alien creatures 👽🐕 look too much like Earth animals 🌎, and while that is still true and these things do look a lot like Earth animals 🌎, they literally called them jackals 🐕 and they used an actual dog 🐕 for motion capture to use as reference, just to get an idea on how to make these things move when they were animating them. But for some reason, it really didn’t bother me that much. It bothered me at first, and I thought, “Really, space dogs 🐕?” But as the movie went along, I accepted it and it grew on me. I don’t know maybe it’s because Riddick forms an attachment to one of them, and so, it becomes more of a character that we root for and feel bad when it gets killed. Maybe that’s what it was did it for me. I mentioned the vultures, and I actually do really like those, I do genuinely think those were pretty cool. They definitely look more alien 👽 than the alien jackals 👽🐕 do, which is why I had an easier time accepting than I did the alien jackals 👽🐕. The vultures are the very first things we see on this planet when the movie begins, and we of course get that shot of Riddick’s hand ✋ in the rubble. It’s just sticking out, and one of the vultures lands near it, and starts pecking and nibbling at it, until Riddick grabs the vulture by the neck and strangles it to death. It made for a striking image on the steelbook cover. 

The Riddick movies have some of the coolest creatures. Obviously, you have those hammerhead creatures from Pitch Black (2000), the Bioraptors, which were the main threat in that movie. I don’t remember what exactly David Twohy called them, but on the wiki and that clip of them on YouTube put out by Universal’s official YouTube channel, they’re called Bioraptors. Just like hammerhead sharks or hammerhead worms. Those creatures were pretty cool, even if the CGI on them wasn’t always the best, and they were unique, I haven’t seen another sci-fi movie with an alien creature 👽 that has a hammerhead like that. It’s so unique, it stands out. That’s the thing about the creatures in the Riddick movies, they’re unique looking. They don’t look like any other alien creatures 👽 we’ve seen in other science fiction movies. 

The problem with a lot of science fiction movies that feature aliens 👽 is that they always them look like aliens 👽 that we’ve seen in either Star Wars or Star Trek, or now Avatar, I’ve seen creatures in more recent sci-fi movies that look stuff you’d see in Avatar. James Cameron’s Avatar I mean, not Avatar: The Last Airbender 💨, get that out of your head. Cameron practically trademarked the title Avatar, meaning the Avatar franchise that most people think of when they hear the word “Avatar” can’t use that word anymore in their titles, unless it’s specifically Avatar: The Last Airbender 💨, like that live action Netflix remake series that hardly anyone liked and was quickly forgotten about. That’s why The Legend of Korra was just called The Legend of Korra, and not Avatar: The Legend of Korra. You can look at one of these creatures and know that it’s a Riddick creature. There’s no way you’d mistake these for Star Wars creatures, or Star Trek creatures, or even Avatar creatures. They aren’t pretty or colorful enough to be Avatar creatures. They’re not bioluminescent either. 

Even though it’s the third entry in the series, Riddick (2013) is pretty open to newcomers like myself. I was a newcomer, I had never watched a Riddick movie in full before this one, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. These are my kind of movies, and I feel like I going to introduce the other ones when I get to them. When I’m able to see Pitch Black (2000) and The Chronicles of Riddick, either on streaming, or on Blu-Ray 💿, or on 4K 💿. I know Pitch Black (2000) is available on 4K 💿, Arrow Video did a release for it, but I don’t know about The Chronicles of Riddick. I know it’s available on Blu-Ray 💿, but I don’t know if it’s on 4K 💿. If it’s on 4K 💿, then I’m getting that one, especially if it comes with a Blu-Ray 💿. You know, just in case I’m not able to hook up my PS5 in the near term, and I still haven’t to wait. 

The one that’s going to be hardest to find is The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury, the animated tie-in short film to The Chronicles of Riddick. It seems like that one was only ever released DVD 📀 and not got a high def release of any kind. Who knows? With animated tie-in short films like that, someone probably uploaded it on YouTube. If it’s on there, then I’ll watch it on there. I mean, someone uploaded the entirety of Transformers: Beginnings, that tie-in motion comic that was released on DVD 📀 to coincide with the DVD release 📀 of Transformers (2007), on YouTube. Most of you reading this probably didn’t remember that, or didn’t even know it existed until I just mentioned it just now, unless you’re really hardcore fans. Once you’re the real ones, the O.G.s, you know. I added that to my Favorites playlist, I don’t know if it’s still there or if it got removed for copyright. I doubt it. I doubt Paramount and Hasbro even care enough to claim it or get it removed, considering they don’t care enough to actually give it an HD release. It’s just a piece of ancillary tie-in material that was completely disposable, and most people don’t even remember, that’s how they see it. 

Someone also uploaded the entirety of Bionicle: Mask of Light on YouTube, which is a much more substantial piece of media compared to Transformers: Beginnings. Bionicle: Mask of Light is an actual movie, whereas Transformers: Beginnings was a motion comic. But it’s never gotten a high def release, nor is it available anywhere on streaming, and it’s been largely forgotten by the general public. Bionicle had its moment, in the 2000s, but that time has passed. Most people don’t care about Bionicle anymore, or even remember that it even existed. So, it still counts. It’s funny that I mention Transformers and Bionicle together considering that a lot of people compared the Fallen’s design in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen to a Bionicle, like a lot of people were saying, “He looks like a Bionicle.” Cody was making jokes about it when he reviewed Revenge of the Fallen on his PointlessHub, and then made the same Bionicle jokes when he covered it in his Transformers tier list video, also on the PointlessHub channel. BTW, I am thinking of re-reviewing Revenge of the Fallen, and all of the other Transformers movies I reviewed on this blog at a later date. But more on that later, in another post. All you need to know about those right now is I’ll get to them when I get to them. 

If these sound like your kind of movies too while reading this, then you’ll probably enjoy this movie too. It works as a good entry point if you want to get into Riddick like I do. I think the reason why it so well as an entry point, and is so easy for newcomers is that it is so self-contained. Even though this does continue on from the story of the previous movie, and this movie partly deals with the events of that film and the one before it, the actual main story that we focus on 97% of the screen time is pretty stand alone. And even the stuff that is brought up from the previous movies is explained in such a way that you, as a newcomer, are able to understand it without having seeing those prior movies first. You won’t be confused while watching Riddick (2013) if you haven’t watched Pitch Black (2000) or The Chronicles of Riddick. I mean, you’ll appreciate it a lot more, you’ll appreciate those references more if you actually saw those movies first before going into this one. Like, I’m sure all the talk of Boss Johns’s son, William J. Johns, or “Little Johns” as Riddick calls him in this movie, would be appreciated a lot more if you actually saw Pitch Black (2000) beforehand, and saw what Little Johns was like, and you knew that Riddick was telling the truth about him. Even if Boss Johns was in denial, and didn’t want to believe it, it was true, all of it. Riddick did not tell a single lie to Boss Johns about his son. 

And the Necromonger stuff will seem a lot more cooler and badass if you’ve seen The Chronicles of Riddick, and you saw what they were really capable of and it took for Riddick to take them down, or at least, take down their leader, and how he ascended to the position of Lord Marshal within the Necromonger movement. And you’d probably appreciate Vaako as a character a lot more if you saw The Chronicles of Riddick first. But, this movie gives enough of a taste of him that you’ll want to see more of him in The Chronicles of Riddick, as well as the Necromongers as a whole. If you watch this movie first before watching the other two, then you’ll walk away from it want to watch the other two, and then maybe watch this one again after you watch those two, I’ll put it like that. Or at least, that’s how it is for me. You might be different. I only watched them this way because of the circumstances. This was the only one that was available, the only one that I could find at Walmart, and I wasn’t if it was going to be available forever, and I didn’t want to take that chance. So, I bought it while I could, while it was still available, and I watched it and I’m reviewing it because I really got nothing else to watch or review, besides Cowboy Bebop (1998), which I do plan on reviewing next if our Internet 🛜 doesn’t get turned back on in the near term, and I’m still unable to watch Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus 🦈🐙, and finish working on the review for that, and then watch The Simpsons Movie and then start working on the review for that. 

As for the future, as I’ve mentioned multiple times throughout this review (you’re probably tired of me mentioned it throughout this review), there is a fourth movie in the works called Riddick: Furya. Before I watched this movie, I wasn’t sure how far along they were with it because the Wikipedia page on the movie just said it was in development. But when I watched the new interview that David Twohy did with Ballyhoo for this specific release, it seems like they’ve already entered production. He filmed that interview while on the set for Riddick: Furya. So, they definitely started filming it already, and they’re in the middle of filming it now, or they were when David Twohy did this interview. So we know this movie’s real, it’s a thing, and it’s coming. Probably sometime later this year or some time next year, in 2027. Meaning Riddick fans won’t have to wait much longer to see their long awaited fourth installment. Honestly, at this point, I’d much rather see a new Riddick movie than a new Fast & Furious movie. I was glad to hear that eleventh installment was plagued with problems and was stuck in development hell following the box office disappointment of Fast X. That franchise should’ve ended a long time ago, Furious 7 should’ve been the last one. Once Paul Walker died, they should’ve been like, “Alright, let’s end it here. Let’s let this be the final installment. Out of respect for Paul Walker, there’s no point in continuing this series without him. It just won’t feel the same.” That’s the cast of the Kelvin Timeline Star Trek movies did, and what the cast of Galaxy Quest did. 

After Anton Yelchin died, the cast of the Kelvin Star Trek movies decided not to make anymore Star Trek movies after Star Trek Beyond because it just wasn’t worth doing unless you had everyone, and having one the actor die just killed the mood. It wouldn’t have felt right to do another Star Trek movie without Anton Yelchin as Chekov. The cast of Galaxy Quest did the same thing after Alan Rickman died, they decided not to make a sequel, even though they were considering doing one sometime in the 2010s. But after Alan Rickman died, they decided not to pursue it any further because it just wouldn’t have been worth doing a sequel to Galaxy Quest without Alan Rickman as Alexander Dane/Dr. Lazarus. But Furious 7 made over a billion dollars 💵, so Universal was definitely not going to let that happen 🤑. But now the franchise has reached a point where they can’t really make anymore. There’s no more gas ⛽️ in the tank, and they’ve hit a dead end. Had Fast X done better, had it done the numbers they wanted, they would’ve been full steam ahead with Fast & Furious 11 and 12, whatever the title for those would’ve been. 

Those movies probably would’ve already been out by now. But it didn’t, and those movies have hit a wall, and can’t back out. There are plenty of reasons to doubt whether or not those movies will even come out, if they’ll actually get made, since it’s been 3 years since the release of Fast X, and everyone seems to have moved on, including the actors themselves. I mean, why do you think Vin Diesel went all in on Riddick after Fast X? After Fast & Furious didn’t work out, after it failed him, or perhaps he failed it, he returned home, to the franchise that first put him on the map, and made people pay attention to him as a potential star 🤔. And it’s pretty obvious to me that he has more passion for Riddick at this point than he does for Fast & Furious, he has more passion for this character than does for Dominic Toretto. So he’s happy to be back home, and finally give the fans what they’ve wanted for so long, since it’s been over 13 years since the release of Riddick (2013). 

The gap in-between this movie and the next movie, Riddick: Furya is much longer than the one between The Chronicles of Riddick and this movie. I bet there were fans who thought they would never get another Riddick movie after this one until Furya was announced, and its existence and legitimacy was confirmed. And the only reason why this particular franchise has managed to continue for so long is because of the fans. There’s still a demand for it. It’s not like other franchises that go on for many years where the fans just want it to end, and they don’t want anymore. The fans of Riddick do want more, or at least one more ☝️ because I think everyone can feel that this will more than likely be the last one. Furya is more than likely going to be the conclusion to the Riddick series. It just feels like a conclusion from the way they’re talking. And considering these are independent movies with little-to-no studio involvement, and it’s being purely driven by the filmmakers and the fans, if they say this one will be the last one it will. 

This movie only happened because of the fans, because there was such a demand for it and Vin Diesel wanted to give them what they wanted. Universal had no interest in continuing this series after The Chronicles of Riddick bombed at the box office 💣. It was the fans and Vin Diesel who ultimately got this movie off the ground, and made it a reality. For that at least, we have to thank him, and we have to thank the fans who really pushed this hard, wouldn’t stop demanding it. And I’m sure it’s largely the same story for Furya, and that movie is being independently just like this one was. Which means smaller budget, and probably some dodgy CGI here and there. Only it’ll be 2020s CGI rather than 2010s CGI. As for the movie itself, I feel like it’s probably going to be the finale as I said. I mean there’s not that many places for this series to go after Riddick finds his home planet. That seems like something you do for the finale, the final film in the series. I also think it’ll also be pretty self-contained, which seems weird for a finale, most finales are not self contained since they have to conclude the story, address everything that came before, find ways to resolve them so that every loose end will be tied up. But, let me explain. 

While this movie does continue the story from The Chronicles of Riddick, even though it does pick up where that one left off, albeit five years later, it does mostly tell its own story that isn’t dependent on you seeing The Chronicles of Riddick to understand it. It was self contained. I feel like Furya will sort of be the same. I doubt it’ll follow up on any of what was in this movie, or that any of the characters from this movie will appear in Furya, except for Riddick of course because he’s the main character. He’s the title character. Like, the only plot point that Furya will follow up on is of course Riddick going to Furya for the first time, reaching his destination after he had been delayed by being stranded on this nameless planet. So, don’t expect Boss Johns or Dahl or any of their crew, or the survivors of Santana’s crew to make an appearance in Furya. Something I think they might do is that they might do that thing where Riddick lands on the planet of Furya, he finally makes it to his home planet, the place he’s been trying to get to for the past two movies, and then he meets other Furyans, but he’s unable to relate to them, or connect to them in anyway. 

Like, even on his home planet, Riddick is still an outcast, he still doesn’t fit in. He’s an alien 👽 even on his home planet. Or perhaps the other Furyans don’t accept him because he’s been out there throughout the galaxy, and he’s been tainted by his travels. They can smell the dirty foreign influences on him, and they don’t like it. Perhaps they’re a very insular people, and don’t respond well to change or to outsiders, even if that outsider is a member of their species. I feel like that’s a direction they might go in, rather than have the Furyans accept Riddick right away, and they all become one big happy family, and perhaps have to defend the planet from outside force. They might do some of that too, have Furya be attacked by an outside force, and Riddick and the other Furyans needing to defend it. But I think the core of it might be Riddick not fitting in or the Furyans not accepting him. I guess we’ll find out, we’ll get a better idea of what this movie will be like when they put a first trailer, whenever that happens. And when they do, you can bet that I’ll write a post about it 🫡.

 

 

 (This is a picture that I took of the front cover of the Blu-Ray/4K steelbook 💿 of Riddick (2013). How could you look at this, and not want to buy it? I should’ve taken a picture of the back cover too because it wraps around and shows a bit more, like it shows the tails of the Mud Demons and it shows one of the mercenaries’ ships, I think it’s Boss Johns and his crew’s ship.)

 

 

 

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Update (Wednesday May 7, 2026): 

 

 👩🏾

 

I was right, Kyra was black. I mean, I already kind of knew that because I saw the trailers for The Chronicles of Riddick and I went to check the Wikipedia page for that movie while I was connected to Wi-Fi 🛜, and I saw that Kyra was played by a black actress. I just didn't realize that it was it was Thandiwe Newton that played her until after I watched a clip from that movie, of the scene where the Necromongers are trying to convert more people to their faith, and the people they're trying to convert refuse, the Lord Marshal steals one of their souls for refusing to join the cult, and then Riddick shows up and fights one of the Necromongers in front to the crowd, kills them, and the Lord Marshal gives him a knife in return for besting one of his best warriors. To which said, "if you say so." That was when I realized that Kyra was played Thandiwe Newton, or Thandie Newton as she was known for back then. 

 

I know the black woman emoji 👩🏾 I used is pretty dark skinned (not as dark skinned as the darkest skinned one they have available), but Thandiwe Newton is actually pretty light skinned. I probably would've been okay using the lighter skinned one 👩🏽 in the actual review. I also learned after writing this review, and looking more up about The Chronicles of Riddick, that Kyra is the mutual love interest ❤️ of both Riddick and Vaako, and there was a love triangle ❤️ and rivalry between the two because Vaako was jealous that Kyra was developing feelings for Riddick and she was flirting with Riddick 🥰 (often right in front of him) when she's supposed to his wife. So her death at the end of that film affected them both. They both lost the woman ♀︎ that they loved ❤️ 😔, or in the case of Riddick, one of the women ♀︎ that he loved ❤️ because he's had multiple love interests ❤️ throughout this series. Riddick just keeps falling for the ladies ♀︎ and the ladies ♀︎ keep falling for him. I'm surprised he didn't try to hook up with Aereon, the air elemental 💨 played by Judi Dench. Hey, people said that Vin Diesel and Helen Mirren had more chemistry with each other as Dom Toretto and Magdalene Shaw than Vin Diesel did with Michelle Rodriguez as Letty Ortiz, and people (particularly the writers of Honest Trailers) tried to hook them up, so it's always possible. 

 

I also learned what the budget for The Chronicles of Riddick was, $105–120 million 💵, a huge increase from Pitch Black (2000), which cost $23 million 💵, and bigger than Riddick (2013)'s budget, which was $38 million 💵. The budget for Riddick (2013) was higher than the one for Pitch Black (2000) but no where near as big as the budget for The Chronicles of Riddick, which still to this day has the biggest budget out of any of the Riddick movies. We'll see how much Riddick: Furya ends up costing, but I'm guessing it's going to be a smaller scale movie similar to both Pitch Black (2000) and Riddick (2013), and won't have a budget higher than $100 million 💵. I'd be surprised if it did. And while we are talking about budgets, I talked in the review about how I was right what I said about Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die largely being ignored and forgotten about, well, I didn't know just how right I was since I recently found that the movie only grossed $9.3 million 💵 worldwide against a budget of $20 million 💵, so...😬. That's pretty bad. That pretty much means that Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die was a straight up bomb 💣. 

 

It wasn't the big comeback for Gore Verbinski that people were expecting. I feel like his career's over after this. This was his one shot to prove that he was still a viable director who can make profitable movies, and he blew it. I doubt Hollywood will give him another chance after this, unless Disney calls him back to do another Pirates of the Caribbean 🏴‍☠️ movie, just Paramount did with Michael Bay and asking him to come back to do another Transformers movie after the last two bombed 💣. I mean, it's possible since Johnny Depp has pretty much been exonerated in the eyes of the public since most of the public (or at least most of the Internet 🛜) was on his side during the case between him and Amber Heard. Almost no one was on Amber Heard's side except for certain female journalists ♀︎ and some feminists ♀︎. But they were very much in the minority. It was pretty unpopular to be in any way supportive of Amber Heard during that trial, it was way more popular and acceptable to be on Johnny Depp's side. I mean, Amber Heard could be totally innocent and Johnny Depp could be totally guilty, we'll just never know since he won the case and she lost. And in the court of public opinion that's all that matters. Personally though, I'd much rather see a Rango 2 than a Pirates of the Caribbean 6 🏴‍☠️. Make that reality instead of traveling back to Caribbean with Jack Sparrow 🙄. Then again, I was never really a fan of the Pirates of the Caribbean 🏴‍☠️ movies (I was always way more into Michael Bay Transformers, or Bayformers as they're often referred to as), so who am I to say?