Movie Review | Three Musketeers

The Three Musketeers is the latest (and most unnecessary) retelling of Alexandre Dumas' classic story, but rather sizable liberties have been taken with the source material (I don't remember airships being mentioned in the book, but it has been a while since I've looked).

The whole thing is such mess, it's hard to know where to start.

The movie's tone harkens back to those bad, old '90s star vehicles (think Hudson Hawk), where directors felt it was necessary to punctuate the action with unfunny comedy.

The dialogue is uniformly horrible — the characters only exist to spout ancient cliches. It is at its worst when it's trying to be witty (the movie honestly tried to foist the old "battle of wits with an unarmed man" line on its audience. In 2011).

The main characters are entirely without charisma, even the typically good Ray Stevenson (it's like they purposely made a less interesting version of his character in Rome, Titus Pullo). The film's villians look like they're having fun, at least — Orlando Bloom does his best to add a campy air to the proceedings as the Duke of Buckingham, and Christoph Waltz is passable as Cardinal Richelieu.

We're never really given a reason to care, either. The stakes are almost ridiculously low — the cardinal has a plan to steal the queen's diamonds, which will start a war somehow, and the musketeers must recover the jewels. What follows is a heist in which the majority of the action takes place off-screen (hint to aspiring filmmakers: audiences typically like to see interesting things in movies).

It's unusual to notice a movie's score — it only happens when it's really good or really bad. In this case, it's the latter. It feels like the director (Paul W.S. Anderson) turned to music to add some emotion (which the movie desperately lacks), but the end result is a a jumble. Expository scenes have action music accompanying them, as if the film is apologizing for the talking bits. There were also occasions where it would have been more subtle if Anderson walked in the theater and shouted, "YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO FEEL X IN THIS SCENE."

It's a shame, really — it would be interesting to see a good movie made with the steampunk aesthetic the film has. There was some real imagination in the design: the costumes are done well, and the anachronistic technology is interesting).

On the whole, though, there is nothing to recommend The Three Musketeers. It's loud, dumb and ludicrously plotted.

Grade: F

The Three Musketeers is rated PG-13.