Riddickulous

Poor Vin Diesel. He’s staked his Hollywood career, his future fortune, nay his very right to call himself Vin Diesel (real name, Mark Vincent) on a “Battlestar Galactica” remake.

“The Chronicles of Riddick” is a messy, messianic slasher/blaster in the “Matrix Half-Loaded” tradition, all nonsense plot and baroque costumes, sets and special effects.

Vin’s oiled and pumped up. He has the cool name. He growls the cool lines.

“It’s been a long time since I smelled ‘beautiful.’ ”

He still wears the cool goggles. But “The Chronicles of Riddick” is not the intimate, humanistic, be-very-afraid-of-the-dark sci-fi fright-fest that “Pitch Black” was. That movie wasn’t cheap. But this one is a budget-buster whose very extravagance overwhelms it.

The chronicle begins with our murderous hero sprinting over a snow-covered planet where, wearing too much hair and too many rags, he’s being hounded by mercenaries.

Turns out that the price on his head is a lot higher, now that these fanatics called “Necromongers” are running rampant in the universe, invading planets with their Trojan Army weapons, Trojan armor and Trojan-styled spaceships, forcing their captives to “convert or die.” They’re an intergalactic Spanish Inquisition.

And we never expect the Spanish Inquisition.

Riddick, it turns out, is a member of some race called “Furions,” who are the only people brutal enough to resist the Necros. He is told this by a ghostly creature played by Judi Dench. Maybe that cool special effect kept her from having to share a set with Diesel, Colm Feore (Lord Marshall of the Necros), Linus Roach (of “Priest”) or Thandie Newton as the Lady Macbeth in the chronicle.

Riddick has been summoned by Iman (Keith David), one of the survivors of “Pitch Black.” And his quest takes him to a prison planet, the hellishly hot Crematoria, to save Jack, the other person to escape Pitch Black with them. Jack’s now played by the much more adult and foxy former model Alexa Davalos.

Ask yourself how much imagination it took to name a hot-hot-hot place “Crematoria?”

The Necromongers are an apocalyptic cult yearning for the coming of the “underverse” to this universe – aka “Kingdom Come,” “The Hereafter,” etc. But what are Necromongers but a thinly disguised version of the biblical Necromancers?

Writer-director David Twohy, who stumbled into a career thanks to “Pitch Black” after writing “Water World,” seems to have dozed off during a marathon “Lord of the Rings”/ “Matrix” viewing session, woken up, and dashed off this story without a second thought. How else to explain the look, story arc and characters of this mess?

Worst of all, he blows much of his star’s appeal by removing his mystery. No longer an unmotivated killer, Riddick is now just another soldier with spooky eyes. The darkness that made “Pitch Black” work, accentuated by Riddick’s need to hide his light-sensitive eyes almost all of the time, is lost here. Diesel must have given himself goggle-burns, the way he kept yanking the glasses on and off in ever more elaborate gestures.

Diesel may yet live up to the “Next Action Hero” hype that attended him and The Rock a couple of years ago. But Hollywood, which has done fine in creating characters for them, needs to find somebody to write these guys a script worth following. Otherwise, they’re looking at a future of voicing video games and posing for the cover of Gameboy boxes.