Two contrasting action movies – Riddick and White House Down – are not only examples of how less can be more, and vice versa, but how a B-movie done well can be better than an A-movie blockbuster done badly.
B-movie Riddick cost just under US$40 million to make, while A-movie White House Down cost US$150m. Both are so-called popcorn movies, in which you relax your suspension of disbelief. But while one is palatable popcorn-munching entertainment, the other is such a dumb spectacle that its popcorn value is hard to swallow.
Sci-fi action thriller Riddick stars Vin Diesel (born Mark Sinclair Vincent), who returns to the role that launched his career as a macho action star, and who shows how to be effective with little more than tough-guy, taciturn, testosterone posturing.
Diesel first played escaped convict Richard Riddick in Pitch Black in 2000. While he reprised the role in The Chronicles of Riddick (2004), he has spent most of the past 13 years starring in six films in the Fast and the Furious franchise, which started in 2001, as well as in action movies like xXx and A Man Apart.
For Riddick, Diesel is reunited with writer-director David Twohy, who wrote and helmed the first two movies, and together they smartly strip the story and main character down to basics – in effect, echoing what worked in Pitch Black but got lost in excess in The Chronicles of Riddick.
Riddick once again finds himself stranded on a desolate desert planet, where he has to contend with alien predators, then bounty hunters and a second mercenary group with a more personal agenda.
Riddick – with eyes either covered by goggles or with glowing irises – is equal parts outlaw, loner survivalist and indomitable antihero, a fusion of Rambo, Mad Max and Jack Reacher. He can, albeit with a grimace, set his own broken leg, is clever enough to create a venom vaccine (and brave enough to trust it), and displays incredible skills with his feet.
Twohy gives Riddick some deadpan-funny voiceover and adeptly blends a movie that is half creature-feature and half “one man taking on superior numbers”. The story has a logic flaw or two, while the climax, having reached a point where Riddick looks trapped and doomed, collapses into a rushed and too convenient ending.
The special effects are generally satisfactory, including a giant hyena-like dog that becomes Riddick’s sidekick, and some nasty serpentine monsters.
Riddick is B-movie fodder but competently presented in a lean, tightly compact, easy-to-enjoy way.
White House Down Starring Channing Tatum, Jamie Foxx. Directed by Roland Emmerich. M. 1.5 stars
In the contemporary action thriller White House Down, terrorists attack the White House, taking the president hostage. Only one person can possibly save him – and save the world from nuclear armageddon – while also trying to save a kid and contending with a traitor.
Sound familiar? The same scenario was the basis of Olympus Has Fallen (which screened in Nelson in April), inspiring some commentators to describe it and White House Down as Die Hard in the White House.
Of the two, White House Down has the bigger budget and bigger star power – Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx to Olympus Has Fallen’s Gerard Butler and Aaron Eckhart – and is more action-laden.
But, hard as it is to think possible, it is more over-the-top ridiculous, noisy and brainless than Olympus.
Much of the credit for that goes to director Roland Emmerich, who previously destroyed the White House in Independence Day and is well-known for other overkill, preposterous blockbusters (2012, The Day After Tomorrow, Godzilla).
Emmerich never met a cliche he couldn’t do bigger and better – and has more love for special effects than for story plausibility and characterisation. In White House Down he strings together action sequences that alternate between silly and stupid, absurd and asinine.
Too bad, because he has a worthwhile cast – James Woods, Richard Jenkins, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jason Clark – that rivals the supporting cast of Olympus Has Fallen (Melissa Leo, Morgan Freeman, Angela Bassett, Dylan McDermott and Rick Yune), but White House Down is more bloated, flatulent, longer and eventually tedious.
It’s not the first time Hollywood has had two movies with very similar stories released within a year of each other – other examples being Armageddon and Deep Impact (1998), Dante’s Peak and Volcano (1997), and Tombstone and Wyatt Earp (1993/94). In this instance, neither film impresses, with Olympus being marginally superior and less insulting to one’s action fantasy intelligence than White House Down.
