Product: The Musketeer (2001)
Rating: 3.0
Some good ideas -- they just don't all belong in one movie
On the surface, "The Musketeer" has a good central idea: Take Dumas' classic swashbuckling tale and add a touch of modern Hong Kong wire work to the action. Described like that, it's easy to see what was intended: Soaring, even transcendant action, battles that are as much dance as they are combat, and a shot in the arm to a nearly dead genre.It didn't quite turn out that way.It has been said that too many cooks can spoil the soup, and here, we see too many ideas doing the same. "The Musketeer" rolls together too-little wire work, a grubbily accurate recreation of the period (which means the film is so dark that you miss much of the action), a special focus on D'Artagnan over the rest of the Musketeers, a stellar cast (Tim Roth as Fabre is better than the rest of the film combined) and a script that was clearly intended to ignore almost all of the above assets, putting the focus on the poorly lit and poorly shot action. (Seriously, did anyone immediately understand what happened to Fabre at the end?) Toss in a lead played by an underwear model who can't pronounce his character's name, and you've got big trouble right here in Paris city.Done well, audiences can forgive much of the silliness of swashbuckling films (they did so as recently as the Antonio Bandaras "Mask of Zorro"), but in a film like "The Musketeer" scenes of soldiers repelling down a tower to get at D'Artagnan instead of, I don't know, just CUTTING THE ROPES become maddening instead.A film that desperately wants to be "The Matrix" instead comes off as yet another tired film attempting to cash in on the craze for Hong Kong-style action it helped create.Not recommended for fans of the original work or Hong Kong-style action. A rental suggestion for diehard fans of swashbuckling stories.