REVIEWED - THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK: DEAR Lord, Vin Diesel is boring. Everything about him, from his Massey Ferguson growl to his big, bullet head (sitting there atop fold upon fold of drab, buttery muscle) seems calculated to urge viewers towards the Horlicks and hot-water bottle, writes Donald Clarke.

Where is The Rock when you need him? Mind you, no actor alive or dead could rescue this utterly hopeless sequel to 2000's considerably tighter Pitch Black. What we have here, I would guess, is a film directed, written, acted, scored and photographed by space opera nerds who never got around to showing their work to anybody who was not in their creepy little web-ring. By the Seven Sceptres of Drossmania, I tell thee the result would bore the Pirethiate glands off a Norgan Sumpterbeast, and may the great god Ridikulus rain curses on my ancestors if I tell a lie.

The film pits Mr Diesel and some associates against an evil race of killjoys who want to turn the universe's inhabitants into compliant drones. Vin and his mates end up on the planet Crematoria, where they must avoid the deadly, burning sun - with that bald head, he really should be wearing a hat - kill the spiny tiger-things and make their way back to the planet Barfos (I'm just making stuff up now) where Dame Judi Dench has been reduced to playing an elderly sprite to make up the payments on her new cabin cruiser.

It's hardly worth pointing out which aspects of the film stink the most. But special mention should be made of the computer-generated environments, which, though intricately designed and fastidiously realised, never look like anything other than the work of machines. Boring, boring, boring.