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Message: <blockquote data-quote="argo" data-source="post: 1627646" data-attributes="member: 5752">Just because Riddick manages to feel the barest ammount of emotion for a couple of people he knows personally does not make him any less evil.  Evil guys can have pets too ya know  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> I also don't buy that he is non-evil because he mostly kills people who are threatening him.  Bad things happen to Bad People.  Would Riddick have every prision in the galaxy willing to pay to house him if he wern't such a bad guy already?  He gets himself into most of the tight spots in the movie.  We are told the the Lord Marshal wants to kill all Furions but the Lord Marshal doesn't know that Riddick is a Furion until Riddick himself gets the Marshal's attention.  I think this all falls under the category of Looking For Trouble.   And I strongly disagree with the whole "Riddick performed a good act when he left for five years to protect kira and the priest".  That was NOT a noble act of self sacrifice.  IMHO he left because he couldn't hack living on a civalized world/being a father figure (and possibly because he might have a thing for young girls and had just enough decency to decide that putting some distance between him and kira might be a good idea).  Both kira and the priest were angry with him for leaving and both scoffed at his rather pathetic excuse for why he did it.  Kira was so desprate for a role model that in his absence she tried to reconstruct what she knew of his life and look at how that turned out (not saying things would have been better had he stayed but....).  Leaving was a cowardly act and a major Character Flaw and I think that, for myself at least, recognizing it as such is important to apreicating the character.  Riddick is not perfect, he is a screw up and a failure on many levels, he does not always make the right decision and like many many Bad Men he has an excuse for everything.  We are not always meant to believe everything he says.For me I think that the defining motivation of the Riddick character is his pride.  He is a man intensely driven by pride ("Furions, defiant to the last").  He is an alpha male's alpha male.  He can barely tolerate being around someone who considers themselves to be badass (the Prison Leader) so long as that person acknowledges his own badasosity.  In the event that someone questions his dominance Riddick feels the overwhelming need to kill that person to establish that he is top dog.  Consider the Necromonger who killed the Priest.  Riddick killed that guy for revenge but was it really an act of devotion to a friend?  A friend Riddick himself was willing to kill just a few hours ago.  A friend who when the space fleet invaded Riddick ran off and left with no way of knowing he could find later in a city being overrun at night (indeed I beilieve it was just chance that Riddick found them and that he protected the wife and kid only because they were hiding in the same alley).  When Riddick confronted the Necro did he try to force the necro to feel remorse, toss off a "this one's for Bob" line?  No, when I watched that scene I got the vibe that it was all about "you broke my stuff.... nobody breaks my stuff".  Similar thing with the prison guards who tried to rape Kira.  If Riddick was really so pissed about them assaulting this special person why didn't he leap in there and kill them all in an instant?  Why first get their attention and then offer them the chance to leave?  Because it was more important for his pride that the (surviving) guards acknowledge that he has a larger manhood and faster car than they do and bow out respectfully.  It was selfish and had nothing to do with the feelings of Kira, only that she was under his protection and therefore off-limits to the smaller dogs.Don't get me wrong people.  I agree that Riddick is an example of how an evil character can be something more than a target for a hero to knock down.  I think that he is a facinating character and that they managed to pack a suprising ammount of depth into a summer action flick.  It's why I like the movie so much (though I do wish the camerawork durring the fight scenes was better).But I still think he is evil.  <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":]" title="Devious    :]" data-shortname=":]" /></blockquote>

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