The Three Musketeers Review

Posted by Jeremy Thomas on 10.21.2011

Paul W.S. Anderson gives the classic musketeer tale a 3D action-filled update! But is it a fun period adventure film or a disaster of incredible proportions? 411's Jeremy Thomas checks in with his full review!

Directed by: Paul W.S. Anderson
Written by: Andrew Davies & Alex Litvak

Starring:
Logan Lerman - D'Artagnan
Milla Jovovich - Milady de Winter
Matthew Macfayden - Athos
Ray Stevenson - Porthos
Luke Evans - Aramis
Mads Mikkelsen - Rochefort
Gabriella Wilde - Constance Bonacieux
James Corden - Planchet
Juno Temple - Queen Anne
Freddie Fox - King Louis XIII
Til Schweiger - Cagliostro
Orlando Bloom - Duke of Buckingham
Christophe Waltz - Cardinal Richelieu



Running Time: 110 minutes
Rated PG-13 for sequences of adventure action violence

Alexandre Dumas' 1844 novel The Three Musketeers is a favorite of Hollywood's. The story of honor, brotherhood, duty and "One for all and all for one" has been portrayed on the big screen no less than twenty-two times, starting with a now-lost French film from 1903. The story was particularly popular in the swashbuckling era of film of the '30s, '40s and '50s. Recent adaptations have not been particularly well-received however; a Disney adaptation in 1993 was criticized as being a marketing tool more than a film with Chris O'Donnell receiving a Razzie nomination for his role as D'Artagnan. A 2001 loose adaptation starring Justin Chambers was shredded by critics and failed at the box office. Now we have the latest attempt to cash in on the literary classic as genre director Paul W.S. Anderson brings his update of the story to the big screen, starring Milla Jovovich, Logan Lerman, Orlando Bloom and Christophe Waltz

The film stars Macfayden, Evans and Stevenson as the titular characters, specifically Athos, Aramis and Porthos. When we first see them, they are in Venice breaking into DaVinci's secret vault of his most treasured invention plans. The three are accompanied by Athos' lover Milady de Winter (Jovovich), who proves herself as physically capable as the others. However, they also find in her a strong tendency toward betrayal when she turns on them and gives the plans over to the Duke of Buckingham (Bloom). A year later, the musketeers are a shadow of their former selves while the young king Louis XIII (Fox) allows himself to be controlled by the power-hungry Cardinal Richelieu (Waltz). It is only when the young D'Artagnan (Lerman) comes into their lives via a series of chance meetings on the same day that they find themselves reinvigorated. With D'Artagnan joining the trio, they set out to stop a plot by Richelieu to provoke a war between France and England by inventing conflict between Louis and the airship-flying Buckingham. With Milady in Richelieu's corner—or possibly Buckingham's—and D'Artagnan finding a mortal enemy in Richelieu's right-hand man Captain Rochefort (Mikkelson), the stage is set for a collision with the fate of two nations and their people at stake.

This latest adaptation of the classic musketeers story was written by Andrew Davies & Alex Litvak. Litvak is best known for his work on the Predators script while Davies is the man behind Brideshead Revisited and the Bridget Jones scripts. They may seem an odd combination to work together, but while watching the movie the influences of each is as obvious as their failures are. This is a remarkably dumbed-down version of the Dumas tale, to the point of making Disney's 1993 brat pack version seem downright cerebral by comparison. Davies's period romance background is smashed in with Litvak's action background in an updating that is clearly built for the fourteen-year-old crowd and fails miserably at targeting any higher than that.

The film is described as a "reinvention" to the story, which means mostly that Victorian steampunk elements are brought into the Renaissance-era story. Changing elements of the story is just fine; obviously the writers and director/producer Paul W.S. Anderson felt that swordplay wasn't quite as exciting as explosions and flamethrowing airships, but these are elements established within the fictionalized universe in which the film takes place, so I can accept that. Where the movie falls down is being so damned unoriginal about it. Where March's Sucker Punch was an incoherent mess, at least it was an original incoherent mess. This film's plot boils the Dumas story into a hollow corpse of what it should be and the action is little more than a mash-up of other, better action films. There is a way to pay homage to great movies that have come before, but this is not homage. This is out-and-out aping because the filmmakers don't know how to do it any better.

Want examples? There are a host of them. The film has the audacity to crib a line from The Princess Bride and then dip right into dialogue that sounds like it comes from the current decade as opposed to the seventeenth century before dipping back into more archaic prose. An action scene involving Milady performing some espionage uses zip cords like the ones Tom Cruise zips down on in Mission: Impossible 2. Another scene involves her breaking into a vault and performing the laser security and aerosol spray scene that we've seen a hundred times before…although, since there are no lasers in the seventeenth century, Anderson and the writers sub in razor wire and powder. I suppose we should at least be grateful they didn't try to figure out how to fit lasers in. Another involves one of the musketeers escaping from Buckingham through a hole blasted in a wall in a scene that almost exactly copies Morpheus' escape from The Matrix. The enemy airship brings to mind the Queen Anne's Revenge or the Flying Dutchman from the Pirates of the Caribbean film, right down to the skeleton on the front of it. D'Artagnan even fights Rochefort on a rooftop almost identical to the one in The Crow, complete with gargoyle water spouts. The movie doesn't have a single original thought throughout the almost two-hour length.

So it's not original. But that doesn't mean that there can't be some good moments, right? At the very least, Anderson got a host of quality actors to appear in this. (How he did so, exactly, is a matter of much wonderment to me. It's like Uwe Boll's ability to constantly get talent for his films.) The cast includes major stars in Milla Jovovich and Orlando Bloom, with actors who have a solid reputation for supporting performances in Ray Stevenson, Matthew Macfayden, Luke Evans, Mads Mikkelson and Til Schweiger. Even Oscar winner Christophe Waltz signed on, his third bad movie in a row after The Green Hornet and Water for Elephants. And up-and-comer Logan Lerman (Percy Jackson and the Olympians) is in the main role of D'Artagnan. With a cast like that, this should at least be fun even if the script is nothing more than inferior renditions of better scenes sewn haphazardly together. Unfortunately, none of the actors are quite able to lift the material to anything watchable. Bloom, working under a ridiculous hairdo, spends most of his time twirling his mustache and doing little else. The musketeers themselves do well enough, but they can't get around the fact that they're muttering dialogue like "Okay new plan: we kill him, kick their asses and go get a drink." Luke Evans, in an unfortunate choice, plays Aramis as if he was Orlando Bloom doing Aramis, and the physical resemblance makes it doubly-unfortunate. Lerman is energetic but doesn't prove that he's leading man material, while Waltz basically plays Richelieu like Hans Landa's French ancestor.

The biggest disappointment here is Jovovich. Jovovich is an incredibly capable action star, but her character here is turned into some kind of super-assassin just for the sake of making her do stupid stunts in corsets. Her Milady de Winter (Milady appears to be her first name, for the record, and not a title the way it should be) defies physics and, frankly, all logic. Milla tries to play her as some sort of seductress and when she's not performing triple twists through razor wire or dodging hundreds of mini-cannonballs fired at her from point-blank range, she's playing things incredibly over-the-top. Suspension of disbelief is one thing; accepting that her character's machinations are subtle would require its own double-strength suspension bridge for the level of disbelief it inspires.

Anderson has proven himself as a capable director in the past. Event Horizon is a sci-fi horror classic, Mortal Kombat was a decent video game adaptation and while not great, the Resident Evil films are good, dumb fun. But here, Anderson hits lows never seen before in his work. He over-relies on the 3D and CGI and doesn't take enough time trying to make the action scenes exciting. The airship fights are the dullest action scenes seen all year, made all the worse by the fact that they obviously came from a discussion along these lines: "Hey, it'll be like Pirates of the Caribbean, only on three axes instead of two! Left right, forward backward and up down…it'll be brilliant!" It's far from brilliant.

The one thing that Anderson does do well is the sword fighting. Anderson's stunt coordinators make the scenes exciting and flashy and while there are a few too many "Here is the 3D shot" moments, the scenes stand out as the best in an otherwise abominable movie. One can't help but think that if Anderson had tried to keep it simple, what kind of a film he could have done. But alas.

The 411: The term "disaster" doesn't even begin to describe Paul W.S. Anderson's big-screen 3D version of The Three Musketeers. Anderson brings nothing new to the table and in fact directly rips off as many films as possible, while Andrew Davies and Alex Litvak's inane script dumbs down the story and turns Milla Jovovich's Milady de Winter into a super-assassin just for the sake of letting the actress fulfill her action movie quota for the year. The performances are half-hearted and lackluster, the action scenes are dull and only serve to bring to mind the better films in which they first took place and everything seems targeted toward teenagers with a low double-digit IQ. This is an abject failure on almost every level and an immediate shot into the worst films of the year with a steampunk-powered bullet.

Final Score:  2.5   [ Very Bad ]