While I recognize that there is probably a more witty and eloquent way to say it, right now it seems an insult to plumb my abused and recently underused brain to find it, so I will simply resort to the basic truth: The Musketeer is a bad movie. Laughably bad. Embarrassingly bad. To put it any other way might diminish the vehemence of the message, and we don’t want that.
What little of the original Dumas tale that remains has been so watered down and simplified that, at times, it seems like there is nothing more than the character names and setting in common. Sure, there are some basics-young D’Artagnan, full of fire and moxie, heads off to be a Musketeer just like his murdered dad, and avenge his death to boot. Only now isn’t such a hot time for the poor Musketeers, disbanded and unjustly blamed for treasonous acts, all part of the plan by the evil Cardinal Richilieu to take over the throne. Now it’s up to one man, that fiery upstart D’Artagnan, to save the king, protect the queen, rally the Musketeers, get vengeance for his father and win the girl. It’s all very inspiring, really. But essentially, this is no Three Musketeers.
This adaptation was pretty doomed from the start, though-even from before the horrifically bad opening credits. Actually, this is a pretty classic case of a gimmick movie-I can just see a slick Hollywood type rubbing his hands together at the brilliancy of combining a classic swashbuckling tale with much-hyped fight scenes choreographed by Hong Kong heavy Xin-Xin Xiong. But the movie, like too much coming out of Tinseltown these days, has little going for it beyond that gimmick. And even the action scenes, though lavish and entertaining, are poorly lit, ineffectively edited and riddled with a constant soundtrack of swords clanging that has little correlation to the onscreen battle.
Incidentally, the fact that these fight scenes (really very similar to those that were both balletic and breathtaking in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) here look rather ridiculous is actually a topic for some intellectual discussion. But, seeing as how the target audience for The Musketeer apparently has as its chief characteristic a lack of ability for coherent thought, I will have to leave it at saying that the sight of D’Artagnan fending off his attackers in a bar brawl by two-stepping on a rolling wine barrel looks pretty darn silly when removed from the context of Hong Kong action.
So what are we left with? A lot of ho-hum, substandard acting led, for better or for worse, by former Calvin Klein model Justin Chambers, replete with one vacuous facial expression and some really tragic hair extensions. (Though, to be fair, Chambers’s stunt double spends nearly as much time on screen as he does and deserves half of the dubious credit.). Inexplicably, this pretty-boy D’Artagnan is backed by a high-powered cast that seems to be suffering some career lows, most notably Catherine Deneuve looking both underused and mildly embarrassed to be playing the Queen of France. The only high point, however minor, comes from Tim Roth as the unstoppably wicked henchman of Richilieu (played by Stephen Rea, who evidently sought to escape the film by sleepwalking through it). Roth, while successfully proving that he can make worse choices than Planet of the Apes, at least appears to be thoroughly enjoying himself throughout the movie, which is more than the rest of the cast can say.
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