Film Friday: Riddick (2013)

I’m a huge fan of Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick. Though different, both are excellent. I love Vin Diesel too. Hence, I had a lot of hope for Riddick, the third in the series. Unfortunately, try as I might, I just can’t like this film and I’m not surprised the film bombed badly.

The Plot

Before I outline the plot of Riddick, it’s worth revisiting the prior two films. Although both were written and directed by the same man, David Twohy, and both star the same actor playing the same character, they are remarkably different films. Pitch Black is more traditional science fiction with a narrow story taking place in a confined area. It is a character study as a handful of stranded characters struggle against an enemy that exists only in science fiction – a flock of blood-drinking, flying creatures who live in the dark, with the first half involving discovery of the creatures and the second half escape. This story was well written, well acted, well shot, and all around created a truly immersive experience for the audience, who had no problems believing what they were seeing.

The Chronicles of Riddick, by comparison, was a much more expansive tale. This one involved a marauding army of religious fanatics who want to wipe out or convert every non-believer the universe, and they do it by destroying planets. In this story, Riddick travels to multiple planets, engages in any number of fights or battle scenes, and ultimately destroys or saves millions of people. There is little introspection, no mystery, and less science fiction than action. Nevertheless, this film too was well shot, well acted and well written, and the result was a different but nearly equally enjoyable film.

As these two films were so different, the question became: would Riddick be more like Chronicles or more like Pitch Black, or would it be something else entirely?

Well, the story opens with Riddick getting betrayed by the Necromonger army he conquered at the end of Chronicles. He finds himself stranded on a desolate, hostile planet as a result. At first, he works to heal his significant wounds and master his environment. He befriends a dog creature. Then he essentially summons mercenaries (bounty hunters) to the planet so he can escape. Two different groups arrive, and when they do, Riddick warns them to flee, but to leave him one of the ships.

Naturally, they refuse.

From there, the film turns into a three-way struggle as the two groups of bounty hunters compete to get Riddick for their own reasons and Riddick works to eliminate them so he can take one of the ships and leave... at least until they realize that a storm is coming and once the storm comes, blood-sucking creatures who live in the rain will come try to kill them. Sound familiar?

Why This Film Didn’t Work

On the surface, I should have loved this film. The story itself was well written, the design of the film is excellent, and it was all well shot. Diesel remains an excellent actor and Riddick remains an excellent character. Yet, somehow, the more I watched this film, the less I liked it. And by the time the ending came, I really had come to dislike this film. But why?

I think the ultimate answer to why I didn’t like this film was that it felt like a cliche of the entire franchise. No new ground was broken anywhere and, to the contrary, everything you saw was stolen from one of the prior two films. For example, the set up for this film mimicked that of Pitch Black, with bounty hunters replacing the random passengers of Pitch Black. The monsters who attack them in the end are virtual clones in every substantive way of those in Pitch Black. The bounty hunters feel like total knock-offs of the bounty hunters (minus the charismatic Toombs (Nick Chinlund)) from Chronicles. What's worse, none of these characters had a real personality. They just stood around acting tough by standing very still and whispering death threats at each other. That got old fast.

More fundamentally, however, Riddick featured a change in Riddick's character that suddenly made him very hard to like: he became arrogant.

When Riddick was first introduced in Pitch Black, he blew me away. Here was a character who made the toughest of tough guys look soft, but at the same time, he was awash in traits we like. For example, Riddick never blew his own horn by telling us how tough he was. Instead, his nemesis Johns told us how tough he was. For his part, Riddick downplayed his own toughness. Riddick also demonstrated right away that he wasn't the cold-blooded killer his character was presented as. To the contrary, he offered help, guidance and moral support to the other characters. Indeed, he quickly became their leader because he had such strong leadership traits. Combining this with his desire to remain isolated and the other characters' fear of him created a wonderfully ironic situation where they needed him on many levels, but no one knew if he could be trusted except you the audience. That built a lot of trust and pulled you into the character; it made you like him a lot.

Even in Chronicles, where they raised Riddick's profile by declaring him a sort of dark messiah as the last of the Furian race and as the one destined to destroy the Lord Marshall and bring down the Necromongers, Riddick still remained self-effacing. In comment after comment, Riddick disclaims any desire to be involved, points out his own lack of education and his lack of ability to change the world. And the few times he was called upon to prove his toughness, he did it with his actions and a minimum number of words. This gave him a sense of humility and continued his reluctant hero character, both of which are traits we like in our heroes.

This made Riddick really easy to like. You knew he was tough, and the fact he didn't need to tell you how tough he was only made it all the stronger. You also laughed at his jokes and you smirked when the stupid bad guys took his self-effacing comments as an invitation to test him. But in Riddick, that character is gone. In Riddick, Riddick is presented as essentially invincible and he knows it. He comes across as a predator who spouts off smug one-liners and spews arrogance. There is no humor in his approach to others. There is no sense that he wants to help others who find themselves in trouble. To the contrary, his motivation seems to be revenge. He even plays with the main bounty hunter's emotions when he discovers that the man is here to find out what happened to his son, Johns from Pitch Black. This is a cold-blooded Riddick who is very hard to like and who offers little to liven up the story.

This is why I couldn't get into this film. The story and set up are entirely stolen from the first two films; there is nothing original. And what they have copied, they copied in style only but without the critical substance which made it all such fun. Add the lack of any goodnatured bad guy for you to sort-of cheer for along with Riddick, and Riddick changing from self-effacing, funny and misunderstood superhero into cold-blooded, smug predator, and you have a film that lost everything that set the first two film apart. It's no wonder the film made less than a third of the others and just over a third of its budget.

Thoughts?

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Film Friday: Find Me Guilty (2006)

Find Me Guilty is a 2006 courtroom dark-comedy written and directed by Sidney Lumet, which is based on the true story of the longest Mafia trial in American history (21 months). The film stars Vin Diesel as Giacomo “Jackie” DiNorscio, and much of it is taken directly from the court transcripts. This is one of those movies I never heard of until I stumbled upon it one night, and audiences stayed away in droves, but it turns out to be a rather good movie.

Plot

As the film starts, mobster Giacomo “Jackie” DiNorscio (Vin Diesel) finds himself lying in bed as his friend and cousin marches into the room and shoots him. Jackie doesn’t die. When he doesn’t, his cousin runs to the government and turns informant against him! The United States Attorney now wants Jackie to rat out his friends and family as well, or he will be charged with enough racketeering crimes to put him away forever. He refuses and he, and all of his friends and family, find themselves charged with a vast array of crimes.

The government’s case is supported by evidence from a number of informants and the observations of FBI agents. Things don’t look good. Complicating matters, they are trying each of these defendants together as part of the same conspiracy. Thus, you have dozens of defendants and their lawyers scattered around the courtroom, and they have problems coordinating their defense. The lead defense attorney is Ben Klandis (Peter Dinklage). It will be an interesting trial indeed.

Then the wild card gets tossed in: Jackie decides to represent himself.

This decision leads to a bitter and funny courtroom battle of wills between Jackie, who doesn’t always help his own case, the district attorney (Linus Roache), and the frustrated co-defendants who think Jackie is dooming them all. Presiding over this circus is Judge Sidney Finestein (Ron Silver). And for the next 21 months, the longest trial in American history plays out in this manner.

Why This Film Worked

Find Me Guilty was a rather enjoyable film. It more than held my interest, it made me want to know what happened next. You even come to like and/or respect certain characters. Vin Diesel slowly but surely wins you over, as does Peter Dinklage as the leader of the defendants. Ron Silver too plays a character you come to respect. I can’t think of the last recent film I saw where I liked or cared about or respected three different characters.

And what makes you like/respect these guys is, without a doubt, the solid acting of each actor. Vin Diesel is, as always, compelling on screen. In this instance, he has hair and he’s put on 30 pounds and he plays an oaf, which gives him an usual feel, but it can’t hide his natural appeal. He’s simply one of those people you want to like and he uses that to great effect here as he tells tasteless jokes and does stupid things and defends the indefensible, but does so with such charm that you end up laughing with him rather than scowling at him. Dinklage had the hardest job as attorneys are normally presented as type-A assholes by Hollywood or as liberal saps. Dinklage, instead, plays the character as someone who is talented and is indeed frustrated at Jackie, but who comes to admire Jackie’s efforts and his growth throughout the film, and always treats him with respect. That in turn makes us like Dinklage. Silver, for his part, does a great job of playing the kind of judge everyone wished they had if they ever ended up in court – tough but fair. Unlike so many judges in other courtroom dramas, Silver doesn’t showboat, he doesn’t plot to help either side, and he doesn’t let the parties manipulate him. He does his job and, by God, everyone is going to get a fair shake in his courtroom. That’s noble.

Helping these characters, this film presents a surprisingly realistic portrayal of the American court system. This isn’t a film that lets the characters get away with whatever they want, doesn’t allow for deus ex machina, and doesn’t insult your intelligence by forcing people to accept something they would obviously never accept. To put this in a different way, if you end up liking Jackie by the end, it’s because Vin Diesel has earned it, it’s not because you are told that you now must like him, nor is it because of a sudden last-second epiphany meant to manipulate you. To the contrary, Diesel works little by little, scene after scene to show you that better traits of this man.

As an aside, the witnesses against Jackie and the others are very typical of what you find in court – losers and criminals who have been bought off by the government, sloppy criminal investigators, and people who let their bias influence their opinions. But more importantly, this film doesn’t show each being destroyed. Instead, you get what you normally get in court, one side presenting the evidence, the other side casting doubt on the witnesses, and everyone needing to wait to see what the jury made of the exchange.

As I point out a few weeks ago, the key here is that every moment of this film is credible and realistic and it earns your emotions by winning them little by little. And the result of all of that is that you do come to care about the characters and what happens, and that holds your attention to the very end, through the good, the bad, the funny, the serious, the emotional and the asides. This is not a film someone like a Judd Apatow could have written.

So how does this film compare to other legal dramas? I still see Presumed Innocent as the high watermark, but this film has a similar feel to it. This film is much more realistic than anything Grisham has done. It’s not as funny as My Cousin Vinny, but it’s not meant to be – though it is funny at times. The one problem I would say with this film is that it has a curious lack of high stakes because Jackie seems to like prison – he’s already in jail on a drug charge. So you never reach an ultra high-tension moment because little changes for Jackie if he loses. But the film still has numerous solid dramatic moments, and you do want to see Jackie win.

Thoughts?

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Film Friday: Boiler Room (2000)

You’ve probably never heard of this film. Few people have, but it’s an excellent film. It’s got a strong (soon-to-be famous) cast, a topical story, a strong, sharp, colorful script and a driving pace. Also, we lament formula, but this one is anything but formula. Oh, and it has Vin Diesel before he was famous.

Plot

At its core, Boiler Room is the story of Seth Davis (Giovanni Ribisi), a 19-year-old failure who operates an unlicensed casino in his own apartment. He has a horrible relationship with his father (Ron Rifkin), a federal judge in New York City, bad judgment and bad choice in friends. One night, however, he gets an opportunity to turn his life around. Into his little casino stumbles a stock broker from the brokerage firm of J.T. Marlin, and this guy is flashing cash like you wouldn’t believe. He tells Seth to come work for J.T. Marlin. It begins.

The next hour or so involves Seth being immersed in this world of J.T. Marlin. Marlin is a “chop shop,” a brokerage firm which plays in the “over the counter” / bridge financing world (i.e. the penny stock market). These guys run a cold calling telemarketing brokerage operation in which they do their best to trick and manipulate people into buying the stock of companies you’ve never heard of on the basis that these companies just issued IPOs. And if that isn’t bad enough, this firm is even worse than the rest in a way I won’t reveal. Anyways, Seth is taught to lie, to break the law, and be utterly heartless. Of course, things eventually go wrong for Seth.

Why This Film Works

This is a surprisingly strong film. It suffers from the occasional amateur mistake, like an obnoxious soundtrack early in the film and some over-the-top characterizations here and there, but all told this film produces both a fascinating tale and an emotionally satisfying film. Here’s why this film works.

Let’s start with the characters. This is one of those rare films where the characters are real human beings. Not a single character is an archetype. For example, the main villain actually seems like a decent guy, even though he’s stealing from people on a massive scale. Ben Affleck is in this too. He’s a piece of sh*t. Man do you hate him. But then you see him at his house with the guys and he seems like a fun guy who cares about his friends. And so on.

Seth himself is very complex. He seems like a good guy and you’re sure he’ll do the right thing. But then he’s also not that smart and it takes him awhile to realize that the things going on around him are wrong. But by the time he realizes this and he wants out, he also finds that the respectability he’s gained from his father for having become a successful broker makes quitting impossible for him. But then he loses that and he needs to find a solution to his problems. But his innate stupidity and poor judgment arise again and he flails about as he simply can’t figure out a good way out.

Vin Diesel plays another fascinating character. Does he know what they are really doing? The film doesn’t say that he does or he doesn’t. He kind of knows some things, but does he know the full truth? We don’t know. But in the meantime, we are presented with one of the most likable guys in the film even as he’s doing things we know are really questionable. But he does have a heart of gold ultimately, right? Are you sure? I love the fact that even when the film is over, you still can’t really explain his character definitively, yet you know you would have liked him if you met him.

Speaking of Diesel, he first got spotted in Saving Private Ryan in 1998. He first became famous in 2001 when both Pitch Black and The Fast and the Furious hit theaters. He made this film at the same time he made Pitch Black in 2000 before he hit it big, and he already shows a tremendous amount of acting skill and charisma in the film. Seeing his early performance here alone is worth catching the film.

The film is also full of little lines that crystallize so much of what is going on, the characters, the nature of the firm, etc. For example, when the film opens, Seth tells us that people like him get rich with a jump shot or “slinging crack rock,” only he doesn’t have a good jump shot and he’s not black so he can’t sell crack, so he decides to do the white boy version of selling crack... white collar crime. When we see Affleck’s house, Seth tells us, “These guys had all the money in the world, but no idea what to do with it,” and it’s hilarious to see a huge mansion with only one couch and a big screen TV inside... but it feels real. It makes you feel like you really know these guys inside and out. This isn’t just some silly cliché like giving your hero a classic car or talking about what kind of drinks he likes. You see these guys talk about money when they obviously have no idea what it really means, they quote the whole movie Wall Street and hero worship Gekko, they compare themselves to real brokers, and they lose a verbal beat down with a gay guy they thought would be an easy target. All of this tells you exactly who these guy want to see themselves as and how far away from that they really are.

The second thing that works is that like Glengarry Glenn Ross or Wall Street, this film pulls back the curtain and lets you see how the scam works from the inside. When you are done with this film, you feel like you actually learned what it’s like to have worked in one of these environments. As an aside, Boiler Room is inspired by the true story of Jordan Belfort and the firm of Stratton Oakmont, which has now been made into the movie The Wolf of Wall Street, so there is a good deal of truth here. Indeed, the director interviewed many of those brokers before he wrote the script.

Third, the other thing which works is the subplot of the relationship between Seth and his father. Usually, this feels like filler to me, but here it really weaves so well with Seth’s character that it’s indispensible. His father is a turd. You see fathers like this all the time, fathers who think that anger and disdain will toughen up their sons. And you see the consequence in Seth. Seth is trying desperately to please his father but has no idea how. So he does stupid things, which only makes everything worse. His bad decisions then spiral out of control, and the ones he’s making in this film are huge. But in the process of it all swirling down the drain, there is a sort of reconciliation which is actually pretty powerful. More importantly though, it gives this film its heart, which it would not have gotten from the stock story alone. It is in the father-son story that you get to see the real Seth and where you can see Seth doing his best to do the right thing despite never really knowing how. It also helps you understand why it’s not so easy for many people to say, “Hey, I should just call the cops.”

I highly recommend this film. It’s not the slickest film nor does it have the highest production values. This won’t be confused with either Glengarry Glenn Ross or Wall Street, but it compares favorably in my opinion. It’s a strong film that immerses you in a very real world you will not see anywhere else and it takes you on a wild ride that is worth taking. It has complex characters, each packed with tragic flaws, and a storyline that will more than hold your attention.

Thoughts?

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Film Friday: Pitch Black (2000)

Despite being advertised as a horror movie, Pitch Black is high quality science fiction. It’s also one of my favorite science fiction films. What makes it high quality is both the scope of the world described in this film and the fact it’s a character drama rather than an action flick.

** spoiler alert **

Sadly, most science fiction produced today is little more than action films set in the future. Typically, you have a hero who uncovers a vast conspiracy, who will be chased, and who ultimately must turn from prey to predator to end the movie. The science fiction elements are little more than bells and whistles added to the film to separate it from all the other action films. No effort is made to present the viewer with a realistic glimpse of the world presented and the characters are little more than throw-away pieces meant to hit certain plot points to justify the explosions.

At first glance, Pitch Black falls into this all-too-familiar pattern. Pitch Black is the story of a group of passengers stranded on a desolate world when their intergalactic transport ship crashes after passing through the tail of a comet. This planet appears to be a desert with three suns, which bathe the planet in perpetual light. As the survivors look for water, they come across an abandoned research station with a functioning escape craft. They are saved. All they need to do is get power cells from their crashed ship to recharge the escape craft. But within minutes of this discovery, they learn that when the planet’s moons align perfectly, they will block out all three suns, plunging the planet into darkness. When that happens, bloodthirsty light-sensitive creatures will come pouring out of the ground and kill anyone who isn’t standing in light.

Sounds like an action flick, doesn’t it? Well, Pitch Black isn’t really an action flick. What it is, is a character drama taking place in a science fiction setting. Moreover, the universe in which this takes place is richly detailed even though you never see anything but this single planet. Observe.

The real story of Pitch Black is how this group of survivors cope with each other. Among the group, you have a hard-working prospector (Claudia Black), a effete merchant, a Muslim Imam (David Keith) and his two disciples, a young boy named Jack with a secret, the ship’s pilot Carolyn Fry (Radha Mitchell) posing as the captain after she tried to jettison all the passengers to save herself, a bounty hunter named William Johns posing as a cop, and Richard B. Riddick (Vin Diesel), the baddest human being alive.

With these characters, the story quickly becomes whether they can work together to get off this desolate world before the monsters eat them. More specifically, the story centers around each of them trying to maintain their secrets and struggle against their own flaws, while the entire group worries about what to do about Riddick, who may or may not be planning to kill them or abandon them. The result of all of this, is that Pitch Black gives you a strong story with an intriguing mix of personality conflicts as the characters are forced to trust people they cannot trust in the hopes of saving themselves.

Moreover, to challenge them, they are given the time limit that once the moons align, the world will go dark and the monsters will be free. They are also presented with various mysteries along the way before they can even learn about this challenge. For example, they need to discover the creatures and learn that the planet will go dark. They find these clues within another mystery of what happened to the scientists who set up the abandoned station. Each of these mysteries is done gradually with clues piled up before any solution is reached and makes for a satisfying story against which the character drama plays out.

What’s even more interesting is how rich the universe is that these characters inhabit. At no point does the film leave this planet to show you the rest of the universe, but you get an incredibly layered picture of what the universe is like from these characters. Riddick suggests a rather brutal criminal justice system, with prisons sunk into darkness. Indeed, his eyes have been shined by a surgeon he found just so he can see in the dark. Johns shows us that drug abuse continues to plague the future. He also shows us that bounty hunters continue to exist, meaning law enforcement is very similar to the modern United States. Black tells us that mankind (or womankind) still treks off to the wild looking for riches. The merchant lets us in on the fact that wine and antiques are still valuable. And Keith presents us with the idea that Islam continues in the future, though it’s still only a small portion of humanity, and his version of Islam is nonviolent and more like Buddhism. He was actually traveling to New Mecca and he cannot drink alcohol, even though that’s all they have to drink.

Enough detail is given by these characters, their traits and their words that, by the time the film is over, you truly have enough information that you know what the rest of the universe looks like and acts like. That’s really impressive when you consider that most science fiction films today give you little more than a quick CGI glimpse of a futuristic city and then one or two new technologies to represent “the future.” The audience is never given a sense of what people do for a living, what their religious beliefs are like, what their leisure habits are like or what they value. But each of those things is made clear in Pitch Black. And consequently, the film feels very immersive because it is easy to lose yourself in their world.

This is why people wanted a sequel to Pitch Black, because the world it shows the audience was so rich that people wanted to see more of it. Compare that with films like Green Lantern or Star Trek or Pandorum, where you knew nothing beyond what was on screen and you really couldn’t care less about their universe. It’s too bad that more science fiction films don’t take a lesson from Pitch Black.

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