The Three Musketeers
Review by Anthony Morris
|
|
|
The Three Musketeers
|
|
No one's arguing with the idea that classics like The Three Musketeers have to be re-invented for each new generation, but do they have to get dumber every time?
It's a question The Three Musketeers
will force you to confront over and over again as in scene after scene
it's made abundantly clear that the film-makers – predominately Paul
W.S. Anderson of various Resident Evil movies fame - actually wanted to make a movie where the sheer stupidity of events was part of the fun.
Put
another way, if you think you're going to have trouble with a movie in
which five men not only steal a 18th century Zeppelin (basically, a Man
'o War with a balloon on top) but then proceed to stand around chatting
on deck while it somehow flies itself, then The Three Musketeers isn't the film for you.
As
is traditional with Three Musketeer adaptations, only the bare
essentials have been kept: as the hot-headed son of a former Musketeer,
D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman) rides off to Paris to join the boys, not
realising that they’re a shadow of their former selves after their last
big mission went wrong.
Somehow he manages to not only
unknowingly pick fights with all three of them – Athos (Matthew
MacFadyen), Aramis (Luke Evans) and Porthos (Ray Stevenson) – but get
on the bad side of the henchman (Mads Mikkelsen) of chief villain
Cardinal Richelieu (Christoph Waltz) as well.
Various schemes
and double-dealings are currently afoot, mostly revolving around
Richelieu using double agent Milady (Milla Jovovich) to try and provoke
a war with England's sleazy envoy Buckingham (Orlando Bloom) that will
unseat the King of France (Freddie Fox), but as none of it makes a
great deal of sense presumably you're meant to be distracted by the
giant airships and sub-sub-Matrix fight scenes.
Parts of this
do work, mostly thanks to cast members playing things well over the
top, but it's never quite fun enough or exciting enough to excuse the
amazingly dumbed-down dialogue and garbled plot.
Still, Paul
W.S. Anderson has been making pretty much this exact same movie for a
decade now; presumably someone keeps falling for it. 2.5 out
of 5
The Three Musketeers
Australian release: 20th October,
2011
Official
Site: The Three Musketeers
Cast: Logan Lerman, Matthew Macfayden, Ray Stevenson, Orlando Bloom, Christoph Waltz
Director: Paul W.S. Anderson
|
