Film Review: The Three Musketeers

You think you've seen it all, and then The Three Musketeers comes along. Granted, you're probably familiar with at least one of the innumerable film adaptations, or even cultured enough to have digested the original Alexandre Dumas texts. But this, the first 3-D version of the French swashbuckling series, stands out a mile from all that has gone before. Largely, alas, for all the wrong reasons.

Though its beginnings are auspicious (17th-century Venice illuminated with fireworks and a masked figure emerging from a black canal a la Michael Sheen in Apocalypse Now, knocking off guards left right and center), The Three Musketeers soon dissolves into pantomime farce replete with über-camp performances.

Country boy D'Artagnan (played by handsome milksop Logan Lerman) journeys to Paris and there finds three new friends in Athos (Matthew Macfadyen), Aramis (Luke Evans) and Porthos (Ray Stevenson) after helping them see off a batch of Cardinal Richelieu's (Christoph Waltz) cronies. As in Dumas' story, the fearless foursome are soon tasked with an improbable mission: that of retrieving the Queen's prized diamond necklace from London, where it has been planted by Richelieu in order to spark a war between England and France, and ensure his ascension to power.

Richelieu and his femme fatale partner in crime, Milady de Winter (Milla Jovovich), are the best of a bad bunch. Waltz doesn't overplay the sinful man of the cloth, while Jovovich oozes naughtiness as the double agent who has the nerve (and the bust) to stitch up every man on the Continent, including ex-lover Athos, who has now got it in for her.

No such praise for Orlando Bloom's Buckingham, who is an oddity, not least in the actor's apparent desire to ape his old Pirates of the Caribbean costar Johnny Depp. It's not just the mascara and carefully coiffured beard that smacks of Captain Sparrow; Bloom has also adopted the tipsy slur and swaying mannerisms. The problem is that Buckingham is one bore of a baddie. His role in the plot is altogether superficial, while also unashamedly utilized to announce a sequel before the credits roll (brace yourselves for that). Mads Mikkelsen's one-eyed Rochefort struggles for air amid so many other no-gooders, while the Musketeers' rotund servant (hammed up to high hell by James Corden) doesn't bear remembering.

But for all the strange goings on in The Three Musketeers (including the King using D'Artagnan as an agony uncle in an extremely awkward teen exchange) that which takes the biscuit is the USP of airships. When Buckingham rocks up in Paris flaunting his newly acquired balloon, we assume this is the first and last we're going to see of such a contraption, but director Anderson obviously had other ideas. Airships start swarming around The Three Musketeers like it's a steampunk convention, and the sky battle that all of this is leading to beggars belief.

Like Gulliver's Travels at the start of the year, in which we saw Jack Black tinkering about with iPhones and robots, The Three Musketeers has taken daring liberties with a classic, and it hasn't paid off. Modernizing an old text is one thing, but this is flagrant bastardization that detracts from the story that made D'Artagnan and his pals so famous in the first instance.

Does The Three Musketeers look good? Yes. One cannot ignore the impressive extravagance of it all (some of the scenes in the royal palace are stunning, as is the array of court costumes, and there's more than a whiff of Pirates of the Caribbean to the whole escapade). But all energy has been put into making The Three Musketeers into a 3-D eye orgy, to the detriment of Dumas' story.

Amid the melee of ultra modern actions scenes (whatever happened to a good old swordfight?) and premature air transport, there's little time to squeeze in D'Artagnan's transition from cocky young buck to man, which is really what the original text was about (and what Michael York's bumbling boy achieved in the wonderful 1973 adaptation). As it is, Lerman's cheesy interpretation never really faces much of a challenge. And no one likes a flawless teenage upstart. No one except teenage girls, anyway.

When Take That strike up with The Three Musketeers' theme tune "When We Were Young," it might as well be the sound of Dumas spinning in his grave.

Will Noble can be reached at
wnoble@praguepost.com