(Hey, guys! I'm back after experiencing a long dry spell, the reasons of which are too complicated and boring to mention, so I'll get right into it with my newest review. I hope you enjoy!)
- Directed by: Paul W.S. Anderson
- Written by: Alex Litvak & Andrew Davies
- Starring: Ray Stevenson, Matthew MacFayden, Logan Lerman, Luke Evans, Milla Jovovich
Paul W.S. Anderson, despite directing many stinkers, has proven himself to be a competent visual stylist. In films like “Event Horizon,” the plot and characters didn’t have to make sense when the awe-inspiring production design did the atmospheric work (the “heart” of the ship still gives me shivers). Now, Anderson’s newest film, a re-imagining of Alexandre Dumas’ “The Three Musketeers,” proves that, while good visuals and an excellent production design can keep a movie from being a stinker, it can’t completely hide a movie that utterly fails at the script level.
The Three Musketeers are Athos (Matthew MacFayden), Porthos (Ray Stevenson), and Aramis (Luke Evans), a group of 17th century spies who work to protect France and it’s ruler, the fey, teenaged King Louis XIII (Freddie Fox) from disruption. However, they are outsmarted by the double-crossing female spy, Milady de Winter (Milla Jovovich), who is in league with the Duke of Buckingham (Orlando Bloom), after which they are disbanded by the manipulative Cardinal Richelieu (Christoph Waltz). One year later, a fresh-faced descendant of a Musketeer, D’Artagan (Logan Lerman), descends upon the former glorious trio in order to become one of them. The adventure that ensues involves double crossing, betrayal, romance, and a diamond necklace.
It’s all quite a very fun plot to mount a cheeky adventure movie on top of, which isn’t surprising, considering that, for the most part, it’s taken directly from Dumas’ classic novel. What the movie does differently is inject the basic plot of the novel with a steampunk sensibility and a slick sense of style. Usually, “updating” a classic in such a way would be suicide, but the movie doesn’t pretend to play anything straight, it’s meant to be a comedic action-adventure in the vein of “Indiana Jones,” and nowhere is this reflected better than in the look and feel of the film.
The world that the Musketeers inhabit is a surreal exaggeration of the 17th century, like a full-color illustration in an adventure novel. Characters wear flamboyant costumes that positively pop with color, the sets are gigantic and ornate, and the ships are lousy with elaborate, over-the-top weaponry. In particular, the Cardinal’s airship is a triumph of the film’s comic-book production design, with a large red sail and a maidenhead depicting a glittering golden skeleton leering with malicious delight. It’s like a Josef von Sternberg film by way of Sam Raimi, and that’s every bit as delicious as it sounds.
The action scenes, too, are filled with a wide-eyed, vigorous sense of fun. Characters swing off of buildings, dodge epic traps, and plot schemes that take down scores of men. There’s even a fair amount of regular old swashbuckling as well. It’s hard not to get giddy, and the film deftly avoids bloating itself with too much noise and chaos because we know that from the very first frame of the movie, there isn’t a serious bone in its body.
Unfortunately, the film splutters and faults in every other aspect. Whereas the visual feel of the film perfectly communicates a sense of comic-book, pop-art fun, the parts of the script that aren’t used for visual panache or taken from the novel are horrendous. It spends far too long attempting to form some sort of tragic love story between Athos and Milady, during which the film grinds to a halt, and it is also littered with clunky one-liners, boring and unsurprising plot twists, and a few lines of dialogue that sound so modern that they almost completely ruin the movie.
The actors do a decent job with what they’re given, but the Three (Plus One) Musketeers aren’t really required to do anything but be smarmy and cool, and in Lerman and Jovovich’s cases, they are utterly painful. Both Lerman and Jovovich speak in aggressively modern American accents, in contrast to absolutely everyone else, who speaks in an English accent. It would be fine if the cast picked a single accent and stuck with it, but the intrusion of several accents at once in a group of characters that are all supposed to be from the same place leads to some surreal moments, such as an awkward and contrived exchange between D’artagnan and Aramis in which the young Musketeer responds to the admonishing Aramis’s verbose exchange with, “In French, please.”
Where the film really shines in the acting department is in the supporting cast, aside from the fact that the film is full to bursting with many underused character actors, such as Til Schweiger and Mads Mikkelsen. Freddie Fox is a gleeful delight as the red-headed, foppish King, always wearing flamboyant clothing and speaking in an awkward, pubescent lilt. Likewise, Christoph Waltz chews the scenery as Cardinal Richelieu. There’s never a moment when his face isn’t plastered with an absolute shit-eating grin, and he barely hides his contempt for King Louis.
“The Three Musketeers” is a beauty to behold and it’s a lot of fun, but it’s not slick enough to forgive the movie’s flaws in every other department, and your enjoyment of the picture rests entirely on whether or not you can put up with that. If you don’t want anything more than a solid action-adventurer to distract you for 90 minutes, you’ll probably have a good time. However, if you’re out for something a little meatier, you’d be better off staying at home and watching “Raiders of the Lost Ark” for the 500th time.
