To be too harsh on Paul W.S. Anderson’s The Three Musketeers doesn’t seem fair. In fact, it feels like I’d be critiquing a four-year-old for coloring outside the lines. However, even a four-year-old learns by the time they are six that to make a pretty picture you have to be less careless with your strokes. Strangely enough, Anderson has been making Hollywood features for 16+ years and it would appear all he’s done is stop coloring with crayons and is now splattering his canvas with high-end 3D paint.
All things considered, The Three Musketeers has got to be one of the dumbest period actioners I’ve ever seen, but not dumb in the way a movie like The Mummy is dumb, in that it’s brainless action. This movie is just plain dumb from the top down. It makes no sense, it’s a tonal mess and hot air lifted boats take precedence over swashbuckling and swordplay as this begins to feel like a film that never intended to be a Three Musketeers movie, but once they had the concept in mind they slapped that title on for a bit of name recognition. To even reference Alexandre Dumas’ story in conjunction with this film is misleading.
The film begins as the titular musketeers — Athos (Matthew Macfadyen), Aramis (Luke Evans) and Porthos (Ray Stevenson) — alongside the anti-heroine harlot Milady (Milla Jovovich), dressed in the first of her increasingly ridiculous outfits, are breaking into Da Vinci’s Vault in order to procure the plans for building floating “war machines.” But just as the plan is executed, Milady double crosses the trio, handing the plans over to the Duke of Buckingham (Orlando Bloom) and taking off. For some reason this ends the trio’s reign as musketeers as the next time we see them they will be down on their luck, drunk and broke. But I’m getting ahead of myself; I must introduce one more person.
Following these early events, the story fast forwards a year later and we meet D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman) in the middle of a training session with his one-time musketeer father in a scene set to a grandiose score as if we’re watching the film’s climax. It’s just one of the many times Paul Haslinger’s score caught me off guard as he tries his hardest to copy Hans Zimmer’s The Dark Knight, Inception, Pirates of the Caribbean and even Sherlock Holmes thrown in for good measure. I guess I can understand these decisions if Haslinger was just trying to appear as discombobulated and out of sorts as Anderson. If so, kudos, job well done.
However, back to D’Artagnan, who is departing his small town and off to Paris to become a musketeer himself. On his way, it isn’t long before he’s nearly killed by Rochefort (Mads Mikkelson), whom we’ll later learn is captain of the Cardinal’s guard, the Cardinal being the film’s chief villain as played by Christoph Waltz who appears to have finally dropped the Hans Landa act and now seems to be channeling John Malkovich. Then again, none of the performances or accents in this film makes sense as we’re supposed to believe we’re watching some sort of a political feature as France and England prepare to wage war against one another, but as far as I could tell everyone was English, or at least some variation.
As things play out, D’Artagnan soon teams with the musketeers in an attempt to stop the Cardinal’s evil plan from unfolding as he attempts to start a war between England and France by convincing the young French king that his wife (Juno Temple) is having an affair with Buckingham. A necklace is involved, there’s a past between Athos and Milady and D’Artagnan has fallen in love with one of the queen’s ladies in waiting played by Gabriella Wilde who appears to be doing her best impression of a piece of wood throughout the entire film.
And with that, the pointless story is out of the way, so I guess I can dote a bit on other aspects of the film.
The action scenes are actually quite fun, regardless of how stupid they may seem. I did get a good laugh at Milady’s trio of acrobatics whether she’s outmaneuvering Da Vinci’s booby-trapped vault, stripping down to a corset and repelling off the side of a building or doing 360-aerial spins to break into the queen’s jewelry closet. It’s all so stupid I couldn’t help but laugh each and every time. Anderson then takes cues from 300 with slow-motion long-form sword battle scenes followed by a redundant “on the edge” climactic sword fight.
The effects are also quite impressive as airships do battle high above the ground, though I did begin to wonder why the opposition didn’t just poke holes in their opponent’s balloon earlier. Oh well, to think is folly so I will not…
The Three Musketeers is a film that hopes to dazzle you to the point you’re cross-eyed to the point you’re no longer trying to understand the story as much as you just accept what you see on screen. The 3D is actually used to some measure of effect and, like I said, the action is fun when you get there, but how you get there is just so dumb you have a hard time caring about the end result.
Overall, this is not a film to hate as much as one to laugh at and chalk up as yet another installment in the clumsily made oeuvre of Paul W.S. Anderson. The guy, in my opinion, has made one film worth watching more than once and that’s the original Resident Evil, and maybe even that’s a stretch. His Death Race remake was mildly fun on first viewing, but none of his films show he’s grown as a filmmaker or learned how to tell a story outside of glossy effects and showing off his wife’s ability to run, jump and spin. If you’re looking for brainless, you’ve found it.
