Genre: adventure, sci-fi, action, thriller

Chronicles of Riddick

Written and directed by David Twohy

Starring Vin Diesel, Judi Dench,

Colm Feore and Thandie Newton

Classification: 14A

Rating: **

George Bernard Shaw once sat glumly through a pitch meeting with film mogul, Samuel Goldwyn. After managing a smile for an hour or so, the playwright jumped to his feet and made known his intention to leave.

"Some trouble - what? tell me!" Goldwyn blurted, interrupting himself.

"The trouble, Mr. Goldwyn," Shaw announced, "is that you are only interested in art, and I am only interested in money."

Similar thoughts probably crossed Judi Dench's mind as she dined with grumbling action star Vin Diesel in London last year. The Diese was on hand to convince the legendary stage actress to lend her name to his latest, The Chronicles of Riddick.

That Dench was there at all probably had less to do with the project than a related item in the local press. British actresses, Diesel told a reporter, were ridiculously underpaid; an injustice he intended to rectify with Riddick, the sequel to his cult hit Pitch Black.

And so, presto, opening today in theatres everywhere - Dame Judi, Oscar-winner for her regal stroll through Shakespeare in Love, can be found playing opposite an actor who prepares for roles by having his head buffed to a car-wash shine.

What's the chemistry like? Is the sci-fi action flick any good?

Well, that first part is easy. There is no chemistry. Dame Judi and Diesel are on the same screen, but in different movies. The former is a special-effect oracle who floats into scenes, her bottom half a trail of vapour, making grand prophecies about a coming war - a 26th-century battle between the Necromongers (the bad guys) and a renegade Furian (guess who?).

"Sometimes, the only way to stop ee-ville," Dench intones, "is not with good. You must confront it with . . . another kind of ee-ville."

That'd be Diesel, who speaks Forties gangster-movie American in an apparent tribute to Harrison Ford's character in Bladerunner. But whereas Ford caught the forlorn majesty of a seedy, virtuous gumshoe, Diesel's Riddick grunts out dialogue like he's experimenting with words on a foreign menu.

Dench and Diesel have nothing in common as performers, and so writer-director David Twohy wisely keeps them quarantined from each other almost the entire movie.

Is the film any good? Well, the easy answer is the script is terrible - a confounding mish-mash of action-thriller chases, sci-fi travelogue and phony political intrigue.

Riddick, who can see in the dark, but must wear nap shades in sunlight, is captured by a crew of Mercs (mercenaries). He escapes to a planet under attack by the Necromongers, a nasty crew dressed in butch Roman-legion leathers.

Several fights later, he's recaptured by the Mercs and flown off to Crematoria, a planet with the perfect climate for broiling roasts. There, he finds his old girlfriend, or maybe she's his sister. (They never kiss, so it's hard to tell.) There are more fights, another escape, and Riddick is back in Necromonger central.

But wait, a leadership review is under way in the midst of the Necromonger's 10th crusade. A top officer is being bullied by his wife, or maybe she's his sister. (They never kiss, so it's hard to tell.) There are whispers that the Lord Marshall (Colm Feore) isn't tough enough to take over the universe. Even though at one point we see him reach into a man's body and rip out his soul like he's pulling out a sheet of Kleenex.

A plot summary makes The Chronicles of Riddick almost sound coherent when the film often seems a furious blizzard of unrelated scenes. The dialogue is leaden, and the film's stars pull the film in warring directions. Dench thinks she's playing Cassandra at the Old Vic, Feore is Basil Rathbone in The Adventures of Robin Hood, while Diesel continues his imitation of a sullen teenager who refuses to lift his feet off the seat in the back of a bus.

Still, for all these complaints, my guess is the film will find a ready audience. For the sad truth is that set design has replaced storyline as the end all in sci-fi action films. And Riddick is a handsomely mounted piece. Even if the script isn't properly aligned, the planets themselves - the film's real stars - are nicely arranged.

The sets look neat. The spaceships gliding past metropolitan vistas inspire wonder. And the costumes, war helmets and weapons - again, neat, neat, and neat! Vin Diesel fans will be in heaven. Dame Judi's admirers, on the other hand, will probably think that they got off on the wrong planet.