Review of The Three Musketeers (2011) by Lauren H — 22 Mar 2014

I don't know. I kind of felt like they meant for it to be a fun, silly thing. It was like a parody steampunk type version of the Three Musketeers. But, eh, I can see where some people wouldn't like it.

But honestly, I think the highlights were the set designs, the costuming and SOME of the casting.

(Not so much for d'Artagnan in my mind as I was just seeing Percy Jackson dressed up in period clothes. Milady also irritated me to no end. But I should not start on that tangent or I shall never escape to finish my comment.).

The one that surprised me in this movie was actually Orlando Bloom's Duke of Buckingham, in a comic book villain sort of way. I'm not really a Bloom fan. He's okay and everything, but I don't really see the big deal. (Jack Sparrow was the star of POTC and don't get me started on Legolas from the LOTR trilogy.) But I actually liked him as the rockstar-esque villain. The pompous, sarcastic snarkiness didn't seem so fake with him as it might have with others. (Had the script been halfway decent, he likely would have rocked it.) There was something rather enjoyable about the performance. It was an interesting change, and I actually ended up liking him in this movie.

But my favorite casting, was the musketeers.

Athos (Matthew MacFadyen), Porthos (Ray Stevenson), and Aramis (Luke Evans) were very well cast in my opinion.

Athos was suitably brooding and yet there was something that made you /want/ him to get out of the funk he was in. (Did MacFadyen come off as forced in that airship scene? [You /know/ the one] YEAH.) But the movie until that brief scene and then after that scene, he had me sold on him being Athos.

Porthos was also true enough to what I imagine from the books. I thought Stevenson did a wonderful job portraying Porthos' vanity and his pompous nature, but also his warmth towards his friends and toward d'Artagnan.

Aramis was perhaps the best in my opinion of the three musketeers. I thought that Evans did a wonderful job (perhaps the best cast) in the entire movie. He made me believe that here was a man who had come to several difficult truths and who had a backstory and the depth to portray such a backstory.

(Of course, Evans [like Mads Mikkelsen and Ray Stevenson] usually gets me to buy into his characters even if the whole rest of the movie is terrible. Evans, Mikkelsen, and Stevenson have presence and talent and create intensity, qualities that I think are rather rare in the current film industry. There are many phenomenal actors, but the list is considerably shorter when you begin to deal with portrayal of emotions and depth. (i.e.-I loved King Arthur because of Mikkelsen and Stevenson. I did not walk out of the Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug almost /solely/ for Luke Evans' Bard, James Nesbitt's Bofur, Martin Freeman's Bilbo, Richard Armitage's Thorin, Benedict Cumberbatch's Smaug, and Ian McKellan's Gandalf. {The action sequences were amazing but the elf-dwarf romance seemed very rushed, and the movie went SO far from the book...} But I digress.).

To get back on track, I think that where the shortcoming of character comes in is how little the film/script fleshed them out. The script was very stilted in quite a few instances, and ill-thought and scrambled in quite a few others. No argument there. At all. It was terrible more often than not.

HOWEVER (and this is why I have to defend the casting at least for the Inseperables themselves), after I watched the movie, I went back and re-read "The Three Musketeers" and, unlike with that actors from previous versions I had watched, I could see MacFadyen, Stevenson, and Evans, even hear their voices (yes, I'm one of those readers who sees it like a film in my head) when I read the lines as they were in the book. I feel as though they were perfectly their characters.

Unfortunately, the script was a mess and it didn't mean to take itself seriously from the start. I feel as though the three of them understood their characters and that they had /such/ unrealized potential in these roles. My conclusion is that had the script NOT been a mess, had it been a serious Three Musketeers movie, they would be getting praised for the portrayals.

But hey, anyone who is like me and can read books and see/hear them in his or her mind, I definitely recommend that you take the actors that portrayed the THREE musketeers and read "The Three Musketeers" with these actors in mind. I think you'll see what I mean.