Product: The Musketeer (2001)
Rating: 1.0
How Not to Make a Dumas Epic
The tagline on the theatrical poster for "The Musketeer" proclaims: "As you've never seen it before!" We can only pray that we never see it this way again. This updated, revisionist version of the classic Alexander Dumas novel, "The Three Musketeers", manages to eviscerate the story without putting in its place anything interesting or entertaining. This is the kind of movie that gives historical epics a bad name.It's the early 1600s in France. D'Artagnan's [Justin Chambers] parents are killed in front of him when he is a little boy. He does manage to wound the assailant, who gets away. The kid vows to join the Musketeers, a group of swordsmen who protect the king of France, and find the killer. Fourteen years later, he arrives in Paris to fulfill his destiny. The Musketeers, however, aren't what they used to be. They sit around and drink a lot because the powerful Cardinal Richelieu has ordered them to stop doing their jobs. It seems the Cardinal [Stephen Rea] has plans to overthrow the king and also to instigate a war with England [or is it Spain?] D'Artagnan tries to rouse the lethargic Musketeers into helping him to save France from the Cardinal and his evil henchman, Febre [Tim Roth], who also happens to be the man our hero is looking for. It takes D'Artagnan most of the movie to figure out who Febre is, possibly because he spends much of his time pursuing the lovely Francesca [Mena Suvari].I've noted in past reviews how tricky it is to make a good historical epic. Accuracy has to be altered somewhat to make the movie understandable and/or entertaining. "The Musketeers" manages to throw out all historical truths and still not be fun, plausible or very comprehensible. The movie portrays the king, Louis XIII, as weak and Richelieu as a power hungry back stabber. In fact, Richelieu was France's Prime Minister and the king's ally against the French Huguenots and, for that matter, most of the rest of Europe. He thwarted plots against the throne rather than instigated them. The movie portrays the king as such a foolish fop that it's easy to see the Musketeers as not even wanting to go back to work. All this makes D'Atagnan's attempts to rouse them seem somewhat unbelievable.Someone decided it would be cool to bring in a famous Chinese martial arts choreographer to stage a lot of Kung Fu style fights, a la "Couching Tiger, Hidden Dragon". This requires the actors to do a lot of jumping around, doing stuff that was as physically impossible then as it is today. These stunts work in a movie that is surreal or is just plain fun, but "The Musketeer" is so dark and plodding that these sequences seem tacked on and very obviously staged. Instead of being exhilarating, they are, for the most part, simply irritating.The acting ranges from mediocre to dreadful. There are some fine actors here [Roth, Suvari, Stephen Rea, Catherine Deneuve], but they seem bored with that's going on. Chambers seems to have few acting skills. If he's lucky, he can fill in after Steven Segal retires.Coincidentally, I have seen two other historical epics recently, both of which were great. One is "The Count of Monte Cristo", which has wonderful acting and a script that places story and character over action. The other is "The Brotherhood of the Wolf", a French film with tons of marvelously choreographed fight scenes, many of them also with a Far East flavor. Neither of them is on DVD yet. If I were you, I wait until they are and avoid this pathetic Musketeer.