Product: The Musketeer (2001)
Rating: 3.0
Doing a Honk Kong twist on The Three Musketeers
"The Musketeer" is a dark telling of the Alexander Dumas classic "The Three Musketeers"; not dark in the sense of brooding and foreboding, but dark in the sense that most of the scenes are under lit big time. My guess is that it is easier to hide the wirework under such circumstances, but maybe director Peter Hyams thought he was being artistic.The hook with this film is that the fight choreographer is by Xin-Xin Xiong (who also does stunt work for Tim Roth's character in the climatic fight). This is clearly going to be a make it or break it issue for most viewers, as to whether they are going to buy Hong Kong action sequences in a film with King Louis XIII. I am open to such things in theory but reserve judgment until I see them in practice, and the first big sequence in the film is the best as D'Artagnan (Justin Chambers) takes on an inn full of swordsmen, fighting two or three at a time, while dodging over and dancing on barrels. The initial part is pretty good, but then there is stuff involving the ceiling and the big fight at the finish is more about ladders than it is about swords (although the end is really an old school cliché). So the action sequences are okay, given that the best one comes first.The part where I worried about "The Musketeer" is when the credit rolled and the names Catherine Deneue as the Queen, Mena Suvari as Francesca bon Ansau, Stephen Rea as Cardinal Richelieu, and Tim Roth as Febre the Man in Black, before we get to former Calvin Klein model Justin Chambers as D'Artagnan (good look, no act). Now, Deneue is a big name but this is not her movie. These first five names also make it very clear why the title of this film is not "The Three Musketeers" (there have been 20 of those anyway), because Aramis (Nick Moran), Porthos (Steve Speirs), and Athos (Jan Gregor Kremp) are just supporting characters in this version. This leads us to the biggest problem with this film, which is that screenwriter Gene Quintano goes out of his way to make this story different. Maybe the assumption is that the target audience will not know the original story. Besides making the other Musketeers minor characters, the biggest change is that Febre is now the major villain, breaking off the leash of Cardinal Richelieu, turning the master power politician into a sputtering bystander. But once you throw out the book, why should a little thing like history concern anyone?Ultimately, "The Musketeer" is another one of those films where the trailer is better than the movie (maybe they should let the people who make the trailers make the movies). The DVD extras are nothing special, although I would have thought that if you were going to do a featurette on the fight sequences you should actually get into the fight sequences. Otherwise we are right back to trumpeting the fact that this is "The Three Musketeers" told with Hong Kong action sequences. That should have been the starting point for this film, not the end point.