The Three Musketeers

Is it me or do they look like vampires?

It baffles me to think that of all the Pirates of the Caribbean rip-offs and cash-ins of the past few years, Pirates 4 has been the least good. Oh well...

So yeah, Paul W. S. Anderson's The Three Musketeers is an action-adventure movie with snarky characters set in a historical period, vaguely based on some previously existing intellectual property (I think there will be seen as their own genre when we look back twenty years from now). The work being loosely adapted this time is Alexandre Dumas' novel by the same name.

Not having (yet) read the book, I can't say how faithful the movie is to it, though the Wikipedia summary of the novel's plot does look vaguely familiar. I was going to keep a mental count on all the anachronisms, but I gave up ten minutes into the movie. It wasn't the underwater crossbows and 17th century scuba gear that broke me, though. You see, the opening action scene is set in Venice, where the heroes are sent to steal the archives of Leonardo da Vinci. If you, dear reader, ever decide to involve da Vinci in your story in some way, please note that he lived in Florence. Italy has more cities than Rome and Venice, you see.

Most of the plot revolves around political intrigue between King Louis XIII (Freddie Fox), Cardinal Richelieu (Christoph Waltz), Queen Anne (Juno Temple) and The Count of Buckingham (Orlando Bloom). Richelieu and Buckingham want to take over France (even though Richelieu rules in all but name, as he did in real history) and chew scenery, and keep scheming against each other and the French royal couple to accomplish that. They employ the director's wife a seductive spy and agent called Milady (Milla Jovovich, who is much hotter here than in The Fifth Element) to accomplish their tasks.

Did you notice that I didn't mention the main characters in that last paragraph? There's a reason for that. The Three Musketeers (and d'Artagnan) themselves are just pawns for the plot, and are basically bribed to take part in it at all. In the second act of the story, they're cast out of their own movie for half an hour so the important characters can advance the story for a change. I'd list the actors for the four, but they honestly left so little impression on me I might as well not. Most of the time, the characters aren't even given much to do, and don't partake in almost any character development. In fact, d'Artagnan is the only one to get an arc, and it doesn't really go anywhere. He starts out as a hot-headed, cocky asshole, bound to get himself killed if he doesn't grow up, and he just kind of... becomes a dashing hero in the finale for no reason.

The other actors are great, though, and the funniest moments of the movie come from performances rather than writing. Freddie Fox manages to be ridiculous, and yet very sympathetic and honest, as the bumbling King. Jovovich oozes charisma and wittiness. And the villains... how do I put this? Orlando Bloom is a more entertaining villain than Christoph Waltz. That's right. Legolas just beat Hans Landa. You see, Bloom's previous resumé is filled with boring, straight-laced, nullodramatic heroes. Now we have him playing the cackling, villainous foreigner with a wacky accent and an even wackier mustache. It's gloriously amusing. Waltz is good as well, though he doesn't ham it up as much as a movie of this... campiness, would justify.

The action is so over-the-top I don't blame the guy two seats right from me for giggling like a lunatic for most of the film. Now, the sword-fights are actually well coreographed and shot, and look pretty restrained as far as swordfights in action-adventure movies go. The other action scenes are basically whatever the writers could think up at any given moment. There's scenes where Jovovich is basically redoing her fights from the Resident Evil films, except now she's wearing a dress, and near the end the movie turns into a rip-off of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. I'm not even making that up.

Ridiculous, dumb, simplistic, hyperactive, anachronistic, shallow... yeah, this is a blockbuster, all right. I liked it, though I have this itch its charm won't persist on a second viewing. They're obviously setting up a sequel, and they can count me in.

Oh yeah, and this movie was this 3D. Wait, it was? I could hardly tell...