Review of The Three Musketeers (2011) by Sim R — 10 Jan 2013

I watched the opening sequence of this particular remake of The Three Musketeers and until I actually asked my better half "What the hell are you watching?" and was told, I genuinely believed Ubisoft had sneaked out an Assassin's Creed II movie without anyone noticing. Dudes in black and red cloak get-ups clambering around Venice stealing ancient documents, knifing people and infiltrating Da Vinci's workshop. It was an easy mistake to make, I feel. The video game movie thing seems all the more apt since it turns out Paul W. S. Anderson (of Resident Evil fame) made this.

I couldn't bring myself to watch the whole shebang, but from what I did see, it seems to be at least -mostly- faithful to the Dumas novels. And, in many ways, that just makes the added-on bits even weirder and more jarring. If you're going to make a film about a semi-steampunk Europe with the Duke of Buckingham invading France with an armada of airships, then :cripes: just do that. Why the need to tack the daft airship stuff onto TTM?

It seemed...well, passably acted. D'Artagnan and Porthos seemed to be the most irksomely cast of the Musketeers and Orlando Bloom as Buckingham? :cripes: You need a credible villain for this kind of thing, and Bloom can't act his way out of a damp paper bag, let alone pull off villainy. When you have The Jew Hunter cast as Richelieu, you should really run with the good actor for the villain. Brainless fun, I'm sure. But I'm tired of hearing that as an excuse for sloppy film-making. Nice set-pieces, lots of explosions, 'snappy' dialogue. Overall, it seemed like it was trying to hard to riff on the success of Ritchie's recent Sherlock Holmes films.

Fundamentally, and this is entirely based on personal bias, if a Musketeers film isn't the pair released by Richard Lester in the 70s with Ollie Reed, Michael York and Charlton Heston then it's just going to suck. American accents in 17th century France are not a Good Idea, mmkay? The 1993 Musketeers film demonstrated that, to a T. Not even Tim Curry in full oral scenery consumption mode saved that piece of shit. Heston and Dunaway managed to pull it off. This...not so much.