““Riddick” rocks, and a R-rating ensures that there are curses and gore aplenty.”  Mild spoilers below.

A lot of reviews I have read of David Twohy’s “Riddick” take issue with the idea that it resembles the film that introduced the character Richard B. Riddick, “Pitch Black.”

Using this logic,  John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” is the same the as the Clint Eastwood ‘Man With No Name’ spaghetti westerns.

“Star Wars” and “2001: A Space Odyssey?”  Same thing.

“Riddick” takes ten years, or thereabouts, after “The Chronicles Of Riddick.  And for Riddick, events have definitely taken a turn for the worse.  He’s been disposed as Lord Marshall of the Necromongers  and was left to die on what as supposed to be his home planet of Furya (but isn’t).

Early on the brunt of his time is spend adapting to his surroundings – which at first means not getting devoured by the various predators that roam the planet – till he reaches a point where he can begin to think about escape.

And when he finds an abandoned mercenary station, that escape plan moves into the fast lane.  He sets up a beacon, which is answered by two groups of mercenaries, one of whom is lead by a character with a connection to a main character in ‘Black.’

The movie’s gorgeous, and the CGI is mostly good (there are a few wonky moments here and there, but on the whole the movie is $38 million well spent) and the environments are interesting and expansive.

And it’s a hard-R, which means that there’s lots of cursing and gore about.

The dialog in this movie snaps (and makes me think that David Bautista is going to be awesome in James Gunn’s upcoming “Guardians Of The Galaxy”) and is so much fun it makes me wonder why Twohy isn’t helming and writing the RoboCop reboot, because if the trailer is any indicator, it needs a bit of subversiveness, as well as snarkiness.