After the success of the first “Fast and the Furious” film, Vin Diesel starred in a few action movies that saw small successes in the box office. One of those movies was 2000’s “Pitch Black” where Diesel starred as Richard B. Riddick, a one-time mercenary with eyes that allowed him to see in the dark and a bounty on his head.

The sci-fi thriller saw Riddick using his night vision to advance a troop of bounty hunters and a child to safety through the dangerous creatures that came out at night on the planet.

Four years later, “The Chronicles of Riddick” was released and found the antihero eluding escape from those who wished him dead.

Now in his third movie, Riddick is once again a man on a lonely planet with a gang of bounty hunters literally after his head.

The beginning of the film is a survival story about how Riddick found himself stranded on the planet and how he had survived in his time there. He learns the wildlife, what’s safe to eat and creates weapons from anything he can find.

Long into his narrative, he finds that when storms come on the planet they’re nothing that even he can survive.

Stranded, and with little hope, Riddick summons a beacon that sends a relay to anyone interested in the bounty from a mercenary camp that he happens upon.

With the bounty hunters on the planet the focus of the film switches to the challenge of hunting and capturing him.

This point of the movie highlights how intelligent, quick and silent Riddick can be while he hunts his prey. It shows how much of a force he is to be reckoned with and why it takes a gang of heavily armed men just to go after him, let alone bring him in, or take him down.

As a storm approaches with large numbers of deadly creatures in its wake, he offers the hunters a trade: the fuel cells he stole from them in exchange for one of their ships.

Seeing that trusting Riddick is the bounty hunters’ best option they reluctantly set him free. The rest of the movie is spent concentrating on recovering the nodes and getting the ships off the planet.

The third scenario is the one that was highlighted most in all of the promotions but felt like it was the area with the least amount of care put into it. The darkness is where the character of Riddick really shines but the writers and director didn’t utilize that element as well as they could have.

The movie barely shows Riddick’s ability to see in the dark even though it is given several opportunities too. They even mention how he hunts in the dark and yet they only show his view of the world a couple of times and for a few short moments.

It makes you feel a little bit cheated not seeing more from his point of view.

The movie is a simple concept that makes itself entirely too difficult by never deciding which story to tell.

It’s a real shame too because none of them are inherently bad. But they are unfulfilling as a whole. And that doesn’t bode well for the future of the franchise.