Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
10/24/11
There
are two kinds of movies I love: those that give me tremendous intellectual
stimulation and those that give me tremendous escapism. I feel bad
for folks who “outgrow” their childhood love of adventure and daring-do:
far better to broaden the scope of what you appreciate over time than to
simply shift from one ideological corner to another, I say. And so
while there’s no question that the bulk of my favorite movies of any given
year will now tend to be the kind that would have bored me to tears before
adulthood, I’m happy to still have a place in my heart to sincerely love
a movie like Paul W.S. Anderson’s 3D steampunk take on The Three Musketeers.
As much a Jules Verne-spiced remake of Disney’s popular 1993 Musketeers
flick as a true reimagining of the Alexandre Dumas source material,
Anderson’s movie delivers exactly what you would ask for from a 3D version
of the classic story: unabashed crowd-pleasing action adventure fun.
A large cast of familiar faces, most of whom you’ll know you know from
somewhere, delivers the goods in the familiar roles, while Anderson’s effects
team comes up with some crazy stuff that’s really worth seeing. Given
that it includes Athos and Rochefort battling it out at the controls of
flying pirate ships, The Three Musketeers has one of the most honest
“You know who you are” trailers in recent memory. Take heed, and
if it looks like your kind of thing, get ready for a really good time.
At
the height of their glory, Musketeers Athos (Matthew Macfayden), Porthos
(Ray Stevenson) and Aramis (Luke Evans) join Milady de Winter (Milla Jovovich)
for a daring raid on Di Vinci’s secret vaults. There, they find the
plans for a flying warship and betrayal by Milady, who drugs them and hands
over the plans to the Duke of Buckingham (Orlando Bloom). Three years
later, D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman), the son of a former Musketeer, arrives
in Paris dreaming of joining their merry band. Alas, the Musketeers
have been disbanded by the sinister Cardinal Richelieu (Christoph Waltz),
leaving his guard, led by the eyepatched Rochefort (Mads Mikkelsen) as
the law of the land. The hotheaded D’Artagnan has soon made appointments
to duel all three former Musketeers, now broken-down shadows of their former
selves, but the fights-to-be are broken up by an even larger row with Rochefort’s
forces. D’Artagnan is taken in by the Musketeers, and before long
all four, joined by their manservant Plachet (James Corden) are back in
action, trying to recover a necklace belonging to the Queen (Juno Temple)
before King Louis XIII (Freddie Fox) discovers it’s gone and declares war
on England (long story). Where would the Cardinal’s diabolical ally
Milady have hidden these valuable jewels? In the Tower of London,
of course, where Buckingham awaits with a futuristic weapon like nothing
any Musketeer has ever faced before.
The
Three Musketeers are challenged only by Robin Hood as the most durable
of swashbuckling characters because their fun-loving camaraderie and “One
for all and all for one” code are the epitome of what you want out of people
who fight for justice with a sword. Anderson and his writers Alex
Litvak and Andrew Davies give them a dusting of modernization for our times,
weary in equal parts of the divine rights of the powerful and the alleged
glory of war. Macfayden, Stevenson and Evans do a fine job of balancing
the swashbuckling heroism we demand with just a smidgen of weariness, while
Lerman does what he always does so well, making what could be an annoying
“give me a call when you’ve seen a little of life, kid” character fun.
Waltz strikes the right sinister, superior notes as the Cardinal, Fox and
Temple make a sweet royal couple in large part because he’s such a sympathetic
buffoon, and Jovovich and Bloom are so cheerfully over the top, they own
the screen whenever they’re on it. I’d be remiss not to mention Dexter
Fletcher and Jane Perry, who have a single wonderful scene as D’Artagnan’s
parents.
Anderson’s
never done this kind of mass-appeal adventure movie before, having spent
most of his career turning out fanboy-despised horror movies like Alien
vs. Predator and the Resident Evil films. But he shows
a real gift for it: The Three Musketeers is light on its feet,
high-spirited, fast-moving and quite rousing, even when it’s finding ways
to simultaneously steal setpieces from Star Trek II and The Matrix.
Anderson knows how to use 3D, and while it’s not the visual equal of Resident
Evil: Afterlife, his previous film in the format, Musketeers
is definitely better seen in the third dimension. I really loved
the climactic airship duels, it makes the Musketeers even cooler to watch
them adapt so quickly to the fantastic future thrust upon them by circumstances,
and while it does steal a fair amount of its airborne strategy from The
Wrath of Khan, at least it’s stealing from the best. The airships
are wonderfully creative, like flying pirate ships with some really clever
design flourishes, and the art direction and costumes in general are quite
nifty.
The
Three Musketeers is angling rather aggressively for a sequel it’ll
need to sell a lot of tickets overseas to get. It’s the kind of movie
I wish more people would go to see, because I really think they’d have
a better time than at so many blockbusters that are afraid to be so shamelessly
crowd-pleasing. Dumas purists and people who just don’t care for
the genre(s) should certainly stay away, but if you can get behind a swordfight
atop Notre Dame next to battling flying pirate ships, well, you’re my kind
of moviegoer. And The Three Musketeers is our kind of movie. |
