So, The Three Musketeers, and one for all, and all for one, but I wish it were every man for himself, and they’d all decided to call it a day and go their separate ways. This is a film of no charm whatsoever and I’d advise you to steer clear, walk the other way, keep your money in your pocket, and do something else. Do your VAT return or change all the duvet covers or scour the grill pan that’s been ‘soaking’ for days and I promise you, not only will you have more fun, but one hour and 50 minutes will pass much more quickly, too.
This is expensively and showily mounted, but adds up to no more than a tedious recycling of tedious action-stunts, and comes with a script which contains lines like ‘at least she died as she lived, on her own terms’, although, thinking about it now, that’s fair enough, as dying on someone else’s terms could be mightily inconvenient particularly, I suppose, if you had plans for the evening, and had even bought the theatre tickets. I can see that now.
I am not proprietorial about the Alexandre Dumas tale, which was first published in 1844. I did not read it as a child. It may even be parked in my ‘Not Very Interested’ drawer. Still, I have bumped into several of the umpteen screen adaptations over the years, as everyone has, and so the question must be asked: is there a compelling need for yet another version? Might all the others have missed something? Yes, apparently so. What? What? Go on, guess, although I will have to hurry you along as I don’t want to waste yet more time on this film, and I have grill pans to scour. Give up? OK, it’s massive airships with mounted machine guns! And sky battles! I bet Dumas would be kicking himself, if still alive, but he died in 1870, perhaps on his terms, or perhaps not. Wikipedia doesn’t say.
This is directed by Paul W.S. Anderson who, according to my press bumf, ‘has become internationally known for action-packed films which, altogether, have grossed over $1.1billion worldwide’. These include Mortal Kombat, Soldier and Resident Evil, just so you know.
This film opens with a silly scene in Venice simply so that masks can be irrelevantly worn and a whole lot of water can be blown up. The action then moves to France, where we meet young D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman), a peasant boy on his way to Paris in the hope of becoming a Musketeer, one of the élite guard who protect the King. He arrives in the capital on his farm horse, Buttercup, and just to show you whereabouts the humour lies, he is given a ticket for allowing his horse to ‘take a dump in the street’. Laugh? I thought I’d never start, and didn’t. Anyway, he soon hooks up with the most famous Musketeers: Athos (Matthew Macfadyen), Porthos (Ray Stevenson) and Aramis (Luke Evans) who do not decide to call it a day and go their separate ways, alas.
Instead, they must fight off threats to the King in the form of Cardinal Richelieu (Christoph Waltz), who is evil, and the Duke of Buckingham (Orlando Bloom), who is evil, and Rochefort (Mads Mikkelsen), who is so evil he even wears an eye patch and, just in case we still haven’t got it, also laughs diabolically. As for crumpet, this comes in the form of Milla Jovovich as M’Lady and Gabriella Wilde as a lady-in-waiting in love with D’Artagnan, although heaven knows why, as he is wan, wet, girlish and wears his hair like a cross between Justin Bieber and a cocker spaniel. (Even I wouldn’t sleep with him, and I’m not in the least fussy.) A word about the acting: it isn’t actually acting. It’s what I call ‘doing behaviour on a set’. You know you are in trouble, I think, when even the actors can’t take it seriously, although, in their defence, they are not given anything to be serious about.
Basically, this is a Pirates-style exercise with no real plot to speak of. Here ‘plot’ is simply a device to bridge the gap between the tedious set pieces and tedious sky battles and, when they run out of ‘plot’, the gap is then filled with tired banter (or a stock comedy performance by James Corden as a manservant, although it could just as easily have been Dawn French as a serving wench). There is nothing remotely original about anything in this. Even the airships seem rather Terry Gilliam-esque, plus there is zilch to care about and no one to invest in, and you will be bored out your mind. All for one, one for all, but, mostly, one to skip. The End.
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