The Three Musketeers

The filmmakers behind The Three Musketeers started with a simple idea - Take Alexander Dumas' classic adventure story, and update it for today's youth with a lot of out of place weaponry (like mechanical guns and flame throwers), CG effects, and slow-mo fight scenes. Next, hand the screenplay off to Alex Litvak and Andrew Davies, and order them to make it as inane and idiotic as possible. Then, hand the movie over to Paul W.S. Anderson to direct, since his past efforts like Mortal Kombat, Alien vs. Predator, and the Resident Evil films obviously make him a likely candidate to helm a rousing adventure story. Finally, cast a bunch of actors but give them absolutely nothing of note to do, and blow up the budget to the point that the movie looks like money is being burned for no reason in every frame of the film. Add it all up, and you have a candidate for one of the very worst films of the year!

Where do I begin? More importantly, where do I end? This movie is such a mess in so many ways, it's hard to know. The film is set in 17th Century Paris, but everybody who lives there either talks with modern day British or American accents. When we first meet the Musketeers, they are dressed like ninjas, and using stealth to attack the guards protecting Leonardo da Vinci's secret vault. Our Musketeers include the leader Athos (Matthew Macfadyen), the spiritual Aramis (Luke Evans), and the muscular Porthos (Ray Stevenson). They have been teamed up with Milady de Winter (Milla Jovovich), who is very good at dodging and disarming the various booby traps that guard the treasure they seek within the vault - secret plans for a battle airship that da Vinci designed, but apparently forgot to tell anyone about. The Musketeers and Milady do a lot of martial arts sword fighting, and slow-mo dodging, until they are finally able to find the plans they're looking for. Before they can celebrate, Milady betrays them, and delivers the plans to England's evil Duke of Buckingham (Orlando Bloom), who is a villain of the mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash variety.

"One year later", the movie tells us, and the Musketeers have fallen on hard times. The evil Cardinal Richelieu (Christoph Waltz) has put his army in charge of keeping the peace in France, so the three heroes have mostly disbanded. Along comes the young D'Artagnan (Logan Lerman), who is sadly to be the hero of our picture. Despite the title, the Three Musketeers actually have very little to do with anything after the opening sequence, and the shallow, wooden D'Artagnan takes center stage for the rest of the movie. He's come to Paris to be a Musketeer himself, and finds the city under the cruel law of the Cardinal's soldiers. He likes to pick fights with random people he meets on the streets, even the Musketeers themselves, so naturally, they decide he'd be a good candidate to bring the team back together, and fight back against the tyranny in the city. Meanwhile, the scheming Richelieu is trying to provoke a war with England by setting up a fake affair between France's Queen Anne (Juno Temple) and England's Buckingham. And then the Queen's jewel necklace is stolen. Oh, and there's a really silly subplot involving the foppish King Louis XIII (Freddie Fox) always being behind in fashion. It serves as both a lame running gag, as well as a lame plot that the movie spends too much time on.

It all leads up to a ridiculous climax involving warring airships. There are a lot of CG effects, explosions, and people running around on fire. I guess we're supposed to be so impressed, we're not supposed to ask how the French forces managed to build an airship of their own during the short time the Musketeers were sent off to England to rob from the Tower of London. Unfortunately, the sequence isn't impressive enough to prevent us from asking logical questions like this, as the whole thing has the feel of a video game. And why did the French make theirs look like a pirate ship, complete with a giant skeleton carved up front? And why does a secondary character like the Captain of Richelieu's guard, Rochefort (Mads Mikkelson), suddenly become the main villain of the movie during this sequence? And who thought it was a good idea to give the Musketeers a fat comic relief sidekick who looks and acts like Chris Farley?

I could go on, of course, but I'll spare you and stop. I don't want to give the impression that I am against the idea of turning The Three Musketeers into a campy movie spectacle. I've never actually read the book, so it's not like I was sitting there, gnashing my teeth over what was being done to these characters. All I ask is that if you're going to take this intentionally ridiculous approach, please do it well. Paul W.S. Anderson gives us performances that are all over the map, ranging from wooden and dull, all the way to awful scene-chewing. He also seems to be at a loss as to how to make this material work, so he just throws more money up on the screen, and hopes we won't notice. The bigger this movie gets, the stupider it becomes. I actually considered walking out early a couple times, but some strange force kept me in my seat, wanting to know just how much dumber this thing could get. At least I got my answer. Oh boy, did I ever.

In what can only be called hopeless optimism, the movie has an open ending that seems to suggest that a lot of sequels are on the way. I have a certain admiration for that level of optimism, but if it means me having to sit through more of this junk, then I'd rather be pessimistic myself. Whenever a bad movie ends, I'm usually happy to be finally free. Not this time. I was saddened by how so much had gone into so little.

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